What a Pack of Awful Arseholes

It seems this big dumb "elitism" arseholery, reported to the Department previously, refuses to fuck off and die. The Corner is still being rocked by shockwaves as the various rent-a-gobs dissect what it means to be "elite", presumably in order to deflect the accusation that they may be a little elite themselves. I honestly cannot fucking tell whether these guys are taking the piss or not. Jesus, I really hope so - although if it is a joke then the only thing they are lampooning is themselves and their ilk. Which is fair enough.

This time, they've come up with the soul-raping idea of compiling a list of "Elite Markers" - signs that you may be dealing with one of the chosen few. Ramesh Ponnuru gets things started, noting that "the proportion of our population that consumes either wine or brie, or both together [gasp!], has gone up", and that therefore the old cheese'n'crackers smackdown might not have the devastating power it once had. Sadly, the same goes for the charge of "drinking bottled water", and so Ramesh concludes that "we need some new put-downs". Then he makes this rather telling parenthetical statement:

(Confession: I like brie and wine, have occasionally had a latte, and buy bottled water for my family--but that last point reflects the high lead content in D.C. water rather than a preference on my part.)

Aha! The real reason for all this limpwristed brow-beating is revealed. So we can't use latte-drinking either (unless frequent), and bottled water should not be invoked unless the reasons for drinking it are some sort of elite reasons (like a "preference"), as opposed to a simple desire to avoid all those nasty additives in the tap water. To do so would be to tag Ramesh - this man-of-the-people - as elite, and hey, that's just ridiculous. In summary, elititude requires you to do something the Corner-ites do not. Because they are not elite, see? No sir.

Fat Jonah Goldberg leaps in with an enthusiastic endorsement, and prints a colon-load of reader suggestions, including speed bumps, one way systems and hybrid cars (the latter "definitely a good example" - Goldberg), ignorance of NASCAR and, gawdhelpus, foreign fucking travel and listening to jazz. Amazingly, not one reader suggests that being President of the USA and son of a former President of the USA might tend to make one somewhat select. Or maybe they did, and Jonah just dismissed it outright as being totally silly.

All of this relentless arsepiss is effortlessly trumped by the Corner's Warren Bell, who neatly encapsulates the ball-aching stupidity of the whole endeavour with this risible entry:

Early ownership of a hybrid seems very on-target to me. I would also suggest the new style of hip eyeglasses that are like little rectangles. I don't agree with the NASCAR thing because I personally am not a fan, and I am not an elite, which I can prove because I frequently wear shorts to work. So there's a question -- what are the markers for non-elites? Here I would put love of WWE (which I quite like) and maybe even NASCAR, as it does seem to be a good non-elite marker, if not quite the other way round. Use of the word "divine" in anything other than a religious context would seem to be an elite marker (cf. Wolcott, James). Use of the word "freakin'" as an amplifier would seem to mark non-elites.

Of course, this may all be a big hilarious joke on veteran sitcom writer Warren's part - I'd certainly like to think so, if only to stop me from breaking out in tears of despair at my desk. He oughta be careful with this sort of thing though - it sounds a lot like irony, and as everybody knows, that's how them darned elitists get their yucks.

Meanwhile, of course, Fat Jonah continues to impress his readers by name-dropping Bertolt Brecht and Herbert Spencer, favourites of those for whom Dale Earnhardt was a hero...

UPDATE: Roy Edroso has the last word on Jonah G.