Randolph UT, Round 4

Gosh, the WaPo article dissing the good folks of Randolph, along with our fisking of the piece, has really stirred up the pot, not only here at HazZzmat but elsewhere. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

A Utah blogger mildly agrees with the Posties (so many don't have a clue as to how snide the original piece really was), but gets a pretty good rejoinder from a Utahan (sp folks?) who blogs as Reach Upward (and emphasis below is courtesy HazZzmat):

Thanks for putting the offensive WPost article into perspective. I stand by why I said before. The article reveals more about its writer and the paper's editors than it does about us willfully stupid rubes in Utah. Apparently you're only intelligent if you eat Dijon mustard, voted for Kerry, and live in a place where it's necessary to lock your car and where you can see drunks sleeping in doorways. Gee, maybe they could do a remake of the movie Deliverance, setting it among us hopelessly rustic buffoons in Utah.

There is a reason these culturally advanced snobs call middle America flyover country. They have little desire to visit because it might offend their rarified sense of diversity. If they do visit, they can't wait to get back to their costal sinecures so they can wash off the filth they had to shudderingly endure during their visit.

They accuse us of being non-diverse, but what they really mean is that we don't agree with them. Their so-called diversity consists of ensconcing themselves in enclaves of people that think exactly like them, so it cuts both ways. To them, Utahans seem shockingly weird. I suppose a lot of us Utah yokels feel the same way about them.

Well, yeah. Kinda what we said earlier, but much more elegant in its simplicity. Wonk would observe that while he immensely enjoys travleling, say, to NYC via the train, which is quite easy from DC, he finds New Yorkers among the most provincial people in the world, in the sense that a great many of them find the interests and diversity of the city itself so compelling that they have absolutely zero curiosity about whatever lies outside their borders. And indeed, can regard such places as entirely uncivilized and irrelevant. It is this condescending attitude that we are dealing with here, although, as Reach Upward rightly notes, this kind of attitude can cut both ways.

However, recent politics have shown that this attitude has now been proving far more damaging to the bicoastal media and literati types on the left. In entirely discounting, effectively, 85% of the landmass of the US from serious consideration, they've become worse than a high school clique and no longer have what T.S. Eliot termed and "objective correlative." Hence, their near complete disconnect from their fellow citizens and their increasing marginalization.

One thinks back to Pauline Kael's famously inane remark, reflecting her astonishment that Nixon won the 1972 election because the critic herself "didn't know a single person" who voted for him. Obviously, Pauline had never met anyone from Randolph, Utah. Or pretty much anywhere else in the US, as, you may recall, Nixon slaughtered George McGovern in a then-unprecedented landslide.

It's okay for people to think this way, of course. But if writers like Kael or the Post's Finkel are supposedly objective writers whose intent it is to inform and/or educate, they have a responsibility to cast their respective intellectual nets a bit farther out than this evening's cocktail party with friends.

BTW, full disclosure: Wonker actually has a jar of Dijon mustard in his fridge (imported from La France, quel horreur!). This is countered by a squeeze bottle of Cleveland's (almost) world famous Bertman's Ballpark Mustard. Wonker HATES the yellow stuff from French's (no relation to our Froggy friends.) There. I feel better already.