An Elitist Snob's Take on Wal-Mart Shoppers

Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers: Here's what the educated elite really think about you. Coastal liberal and long-time Wal-Mart hater Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine wrote the following description of how he saw folks at a Wal-Mart in Martinsburg, WV back on June 23, 2008:

But about those down-and-out customers: If you want to see the underside of the unregulated capitalist economy, the people who can't find the non-existent escape ladder from poverty and its pathologies, visit the Martinsburg, West Virginia Wal-Mart. Morbid obesity; spontaneous, public bouts of corporal punishment directed against dirty children; ten-year girls dressed as whores; tattoos running up necks and down legs; smoking like you only see these days in Baku; it's all here. I considered myself a socialist until I was about 23 (that was when I fled my kibbutz for the final time) but a visit to the Martinsburg Wal-Mart reawakens my distaste for steroidal capitalism.

Goldberg later refers to Wal-Mart workers as "hopeless and toothless." What a collection of stereotypes of working class Americans, straight out of Marx's Grim Fairy Tales of the Lumpenproletariat.

Now, as you can imagine, this column set off quite an uproar in Martinsburg. Rather than apologize, Goldberg states:

It's interesting to me how many people conflate an attack on Wal-Mart with an attack on their community. I suppose this just how the malevolent merchants from Bentonville, Ark., would have it.

Yeah. Wal-Mart made Goldberg an arrogant and self-righteous asshole. Who knows though? Maybe Goldberg is a double agent for Wal-Mart; his overbearing pretentiousness discrediting other Wal-Mart haters. But let's face it. "Ten-year girls dressed as whores?" It WAS a vicious attack on the Martinsburg community, and more generally an attack on all the people who shop at Wal-Mart.

And that ultimately is what the war on Wal-Mart is all about. It's rank class hatred, bigotry and pure snobbery from wealthy elitists towards the people they claim to be "protecting" from Wal-Mart.

But I for one am glad for Goldberg's hateful rant. Next time you read in the Daily News about "$45,000 traffic studies" and "wreaking havoc on small towns," you'll know what those code words really mean.

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Pass The Class Hatred, Comrade

Speaking of anti-bourgeoisie manifestos, did anyone catch some of the Pullman League of Women Voter's ballyhooed "non-partisanship" on display in Lenna Harding's colmnn in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News today?

What kind of people can be happy with failure to address some of our country's most basic problems? It is this smug head-in-the-sand satisfaction with the status quo that the author of that message shares with our current leadership that has got us deeper into the morass that I have described. Things are just peachy with them. They have their flashy gas-guzzling SUVs or sports cars along with speedy boats and ATVs that tear up our pristine wilderness. They have enough money to buy corn-fed beef and the latest electronic gadget when it hits the market.

These same head-in-the-sand types often are the same folks who equate pledging allegiance, flag-waving, wearing flag lapel pins with patriotism, and who decry those who don't follow protocol or criticize our leaders as unpatriotic. Like the flowers that bloom in the spring - tra la - these have nothing to do with the case.

Aren't you glad that so-called "progressives" are not bigoted, don't question others patriotism, don't play to stereotypes, don't practice the politics of division, and don't encourage class warfare?

Let me skewer the myth of the wealthy, selfish conservative one more time. A recent study by Arthur C. Brooks, an economist at Syracuse University, found that on average, liberal families annually earn 6 percent more than conservative families. Furthermore, conservative households give 30 percent more money to charity than liberal households.