The French Revolution thrust into the political lexicon the concepts of the "left" and the "right" from the fundamental political conflicts of their day. While these concepts matter still today, we don't get the full sense of the REAL struggle from our use of these terms. We need new terms to describe a greater struggle - not the struggle for Social Security or national health care or ______________ (yawn) but the struggle against aristocratic power and arrogance.
Are you a martini-sipper or are you a maggot?
I have a disgustingly long commute from the NW suburbs of Baltimore to downtown DC for work. It's insane but so are sales prices in the Washington "bubble belt" soon to pop as noted at length by bonddad and others, while Baltimore's boring, uncool suburbs grew without "crystal meth" real estate economics. So 20 miles to the train, 30 miles on the train, 2 miles on the Metro and a 5 block walk, it is.
When I drive to the train, I sit on the crowded west side of the Baltimore Beltway outer loop, crowded because of aristocratic politics - the negrophobia that prevents good transit services from coming to Baltimore's western suburbs, the near-sighted insistence on cars because that's what the oil lobbyists demand, just as car lobbyists bribed their way into the destruction of much of the nation's streetcar and interurban rail infrastructure in the post-WWII era. Baltimore's network was unbelievably good; now its remnants will occasionally cause a "bump" if one drives in Fell's Point or South Baltimore, mimicked by a sad, underused and poorly connected "light rail" train to nowhere, one line instead of 40+. I digress.
When I get to Halethorpe Station - a non-ADA compliant concrete slab with a parking lot and, fortunately, an often working bathroom, I park and see the faces of my fellow non-aristocrats, commuting in the hard way, the long way. These folks work for a living; if they were aristocrats, they would not live like the maggotry, like me, in the suburbs of Baltimore but much closer to the heart of the world's empire. One can see these GS-whatevers, these law students, these administrative assistants and accountants and a few law firm middlings taking their bags, their lunches and their hopes southbound past BWI, past Fort Meade's and NSA's environs, past New Carrolton's office boxes for the IRS and other agencies into the edge of the white collar working empire. Union Station, in its grandeur, its beauty, its Larry Craig-blessed tea room next to the Sbarro's where the maggotry will buy an over-priced slice, is the mere edge of the empire.
From Union Station the maggotry like me take the Metro or the bus to work in DC's downtown. The maggotry does not often enter the real imperial power zone. The maggotry works in down, down-scale places with utilitarian names like "L'Enfant Plaza" and "Federal Triangle." It works near Metro Center and, if they are lucky or well-placed, near Farragut North and Farragut West, where the cool but AFFORDABLE delights lie - a nice tony bite out here, an indulgence in a scarf there, a over-priced shave and a hair-cut from a scantily clad licensed cosmetologist over there. It's where the maggotry can enjoy the feel of being the pezzonovante, the big shot, even when they are nowhere near close to it.
Many people think that K Street is the heart of DC's power. And, superficially, it is. The lobbying machines up and down K Street and its surrounding streets certainly do wield a lot of influence and power. But the real power is not where the power aristocracy works, but where it lives - Georgetown, "West of the Park", Rock Creek Park, that is. Where the Metro does NOT run, due to negrophobia and more general maggotriphobia from local residence two generations ago. It's where the living takes place, not the administration, the document review, the "Environmental Impact Statements." The LIVING - the martinis, the shoulder-to-shoulder experience of "Our Gang." Our peers, our Peerage.
There are two rules to keep in mind about our country. The first is that we believe firmly that everyone is created equal and has equal rights. The second rule is that the first rule is for stupid maggots who have no legitimate business in handling anything, have no clout and are nobodies, to paraphrase the late Roy Cohn, who was a maggot in a moral sense but was definitely NOT part of the "maggotry."
The aristocracy forms the infrastructure of our government and political life, just as highways and subway tunnels provide civil engineering infrastructure. And our neglect of either will tend to bite us maggots in the ass. Ask a Minneapolitan. Ask the widow of a dead U.S. Marine killed because the aristocracy cleared this war for "take off" and continued flight.
"Oh, tbrucegodfrey, you are overstating the case. They really are just trying to be responsible." Oh really? Really? Maggot, please. What else, other than an unbelievably tiresome concoction of aristocratic, anti-democratic pretenses and morally depraved indifference to human life and common sense allow the Broders, the Kleins, the Brookses, the right-wing thinktanqueraya, the insufferable Cokie Roberts, the George Wills to show their faces anywhere but in front of a hearing officer at Central Booking for their unbelievable failure to investigate and pursue the truth and to speak it for five fucking years?
What else allows John Boehner to state that 4,000 dead servicemen- more than who died on 9/11 - is a "small price" to pay? Answer: the fact that he reflects aristocratic, West of the Park values, and so how could he have known that his comments would piss off the non-aristocrats whose children are NOT going to the South Fork "to summer", to Mount Holyoke, Yale, Princeton, not Camp LeJeune and Sadr City. Going to Iraq is for stupid maggots, or so the aristocrats believe and say when they are not being careful. He just made a mistake; he didn't MEAN to state what he actually was thinking. Of course 4,000 dead maggot-lings don't matter; they are cheap, ALWAYS a small price to pay. Why not make it 400,000 - clear out the trailer parks and the "inner cities" of some excess people? This is the aristocratic worldview and Boehner is guilty of expressing it in a tactically unhelpful way. Aristocrat John Kerry got his tongue in a similar wringer some months ago.
It's true that not all aristocratic power brokers live in Georgetown. Some live in Chevy Chase, MD, or Alexandria VA, or out in the provinces tending their demesnes. Some have multiple houses, some use the houses of allies - aristocracy, you've read about it before, haven't you?
An important concept in understanding the West-of-the-Park attitude is "class consolidation." I learned about this twenty years ago at Princeton as a hard-core financial aid student. The exclusive all-male eating clubs (clubs that a maggot like me would not have joined, could not have joined and definitely could not have afforded on financial aid) were under pressure to integrate their facilities and memberships in the face of a Civil Rights Act suit brought by famed alumna and law professor Sally Frank. While the gender integration of the clubs (due to their integration into the University's administrative apparatus and the University's receipt of federal funds) was legally required and morally commendable in many ways, the clubs did not integrate by doubling their size. They integrated by about doubling their applicant pool and keeping their size, resulting in a greater capacity to protect their aristocratic class consolidation. I totally favor gender integration, but it's important to realize that the clubs exchanged one form of discriminatory capacity for another.
One should look at the "bipartisanship" of the West-of-the-Park elite the same way. It's not that the Republicans and Democrats both have "good ideas"; good ideas are for maggot 7th grade civics teachers. "Bipartisanship" means that your own Rolodex doubles and that you maintain permanent insurance against what the maggots may do. Sure, some noble families have "up" decades and "down" decades and so do political parties, lobby shops, thinktanquerays, advocacy groups, etc. And you know what? Cokie Roberts still refers to a traffic-clogged metropolitan area of over 5 million people with 5 subway lines and 5 long-distance commuter rail lines penetrating the borders of three states, arguably four or even five or six, in addition to the District as a "town." Why? Because her universe and Rolodex include only the 2,500 or so people who matter, regardless of what we maggots do in the voting booth. She's insured. She's MONEY. She's West of the Park in a big way, because her Louisiana daddy was too. Aristocracy.
When Broderella and Jokeline and Cokie the Flushed talk about consensus and bi-partisanship, they are talking about ignoring what the maggots are eating and where they are moving within the tightly-lidded trash cans in which they live. The trash will be taken out next week; who cares, where's my martini?
Some might object to being called "maggots." But I would much rather be a "maggot" trying to survive East of the Park than a pampered aristocrat in 2007. For one thing, some days I have a conscience. For another, I would rather be a maggot on the days when I DON'T have a conscience, because eventually my conscience always comes back. Maggots will eat a lot of disgusting things to survive. But they won't kill you, and they don't drink martinis.