Roger Ebert, unlike Andrew Breitbart, is from ‘Middle America’
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In my blog post yesterday on the future of the Wall Street Journal, I noted how humorous I found it that a well-heeled Australian and Englishman would be sitting around the Journal’s newsroom deciding that Sarah Palin connects to the concerns of ‘mostAmericans,’ about whom they know nothing.
Today, we have another example, this time with Andrew Breitbart slicing into Roger Ebert’s use of the Twitter to make fun of the Tea Party. Los Angeles Times:
Andrew Breitbart, publisher of several influential conservative blogs including Big Hollywood, defends Ebert the new-media user while attacking Ebert the political thinker. Breitbart says that Ebert’s Twitter posts reveal a patronizing view of tea party adherents that serves as a “caricature of the liberal mind-set” and that the critic brims with “raw contempt for Middle America.”
Roger Ebert was born and raised in the vicinity of Urbana, Illinois. It doesn’t get a lot more ‘Middle America’ than that.
Andrew Breitbart in his own predictable self-description, “grew up in Brentwood a secular liberal Jew.” Which is not particularly ‘middle’ given that it’s an affluent neighborhood not far from Hollyweird, California on the country’s west coast. To some of Breitbart’s racist readers (and not all of them are racists, but I could draw that Venn diagram), that Jew thing makes him not very American, either. I know how he feels.
Just to say that if I have to consult someone on ‘Middle American values,’ whatever Sarah Palin says those are this week, I’m probably going to turn first to Ebert and his midwestern roots rather than Breitbart and his scowling class jealousy because his daddy wasn’t a movie producer when he grew up.
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Breitbart’s claims are pure identity politics — on its better days, thats something that the American right rejects.
Ebert’s favorite restaurant was Steak ‘n’ Shake. You can’t get more Midwestern than that.
Roger Ebert is a dorky, dumpy eggplant of a man who gives worthless film reviews. Populist princess Sarah Palin rules the heartland.
America is not in jepardy from some coastal urban melting pot, working class democratic values taking over the country. The MacGuffin of liberal values is a magician’s misdirection.
And the magicians in this case are elitist upper class conservatives who have used a myth of middle American, the Leave it to Beaver, Dr. Welby, Walton values to dismantle anti-trust protections, to use free enterprise nonsense rugged individualism to ship jobs overseas, to privatize utilities with the false promise of lower costs, to let industries police themselves, to dismantle our economic depression era protections from rampant greedy
bankers and stock market crooks. While all this was happening middle America worried about evolution and gays and someone taking your hunting rifles away, some completely absurd “assault” on Christianity and the fear that our women are in danger of being forced to wear burkas.
Here’s a flash from the coast to Middle America…you have been had, conned, flimflamed, gyped, hustled, and had your pocket book and wallet picked. Your wages didn’t go up,
you borrowed on your home, you created great wealth to move from your pockets to the Muslims and Communists while you railed against them, you gave away your children’s future and you condoned an illegal war but refused to pay for it. Now you drive miles everyday to work in the city driving over substandard roads and bridges with a view of lovely farms owned by huge corporations subsidized by your tax dollars while you listen to a multimillionaire spout nonsense about socialists and taking back a country that has been hijacked right under your nose by the conservative fat cats who are laughing all the way to the bank to deposit tax dollars not from you but future generations of middle Americans. You have coddled and supported corrupt legislators who serve industries who spout folksy homilies while letting lobbyists write bills that screw you.
Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver both have to work to pay that second mortgage and Dr. Welby works for some near bankrupt managed care hospital and the Waltons are watching the coal company tear up their mountain for coal.
Wake up middle America your values are hardly in danger but your country is.