Well, given the subject & the tone of the diary entry, I suppose I should have expected what I got, which was being told, in so many words, by so many posters, that I was full of shit for wishing John Kerry were not a child of privilege. It was pointed out to me that many presidents have been rich so what's my problem & it was pointed out to me that some presidents have been poor so what's my problem? And I was pinned as a poor speller with the associated hope that I am "not an English professor." As it happens, I am an English professor, though a slightly dyslexic one who usually uses a spellchecker. You want to make something of it? Bully for you, you've mastered the low-level cognitive skill of spelling. (Apparently last night I pasted when I should have copied & copied when I should have pasted.) Well, yeah, poor me. I'm sensitive about it. Oh, & then a couple of little people asked me to comment on my own diary thread just so they could mod me down. Charming.
Nobody in the comments actually said anything about the role of wealth in politics, though. And nobody actually seemed to have read very carefully the way I gave context to my lament about Kerry's financial situation. And nobody remarked, as I had thought they would, that at least John Edwards earned his wealth by lawyering. (I would have said, yes, I admire him for that but that I don't think he has the ability to get control of the Vietnam Myth the way Kerry does & slam Bush with it. But that would have been an actual conversation, not adolescent nit-picking.)
I wrote my post after making the following observation on my own blog:
Item: The boy-king George W. Bush, child of privilege, rams through tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans & his Chancellor of the Exchequer goes before Congress to say that, alas, my lords, we have no option but to cut retirement benefits to all the productive members of our society: factory workers, clerks, teachers (hiss! terrorists!), nurses, truck drivers, computer programmers & etc. That is, my lords, when we are not forced, for the sake of efficiency, of course, to export their jobs to Malaysia & India.
Item: To distract the citizenry while fleecing them, the Bush administration appeals to their worst prejudices & vilest instincts: Start a move to amend the Constitution to formally deny 10% of the population the right to marry.
Item: Without the utterly unnecessary Iraq Adventure, we would be billions closer to fiscal sanity. And more than 500 American lives & thousands upon thousands of Iraqi lives closer to moral sanity.
So I had class & wealth on my mind. It seemed only fair after calling GWB a child of privilege so many times that I look at my own candidate with a critical eye. Apparently that's not allowed here. Oh, & as an English professor, I've got to say, some of you guys really need to learn to read beyond your own preconceptions. Or at least read with some attention to tone & ambivalence. And for me, all this points up the limits of the sort of social environment represented by dKos & places like it. We're all very happy to brand the Freepers & Coulterites as group-thinking monkeys, but just let someone step slightly outside the accepted discourse here & they get hit with everything we've got. Now that I've experienced it first-hand, I'll look harder at views that run counter to the conventional wisdom & read more carefully views with which I don't agree.
