HANSON NAILS IT – AT 8:43 A.M. ET:  The invaluable Victor Davis Hanson turns his attention to defining a cultural elite.  I think he makes some excellent points in a must-read article, for the cultural elites are running the show, and don't think very much of we mere mortals. 

But just who are these people?  I've defined them here as individuals who'd put their College Board scores on their gravestones.  I think that's a good place to start.  Hanson:

So what is a cultural elite?

It is a sloppy term that might include the academic class in the university that educates our children in college. The upper echelons that run government departments constitute part of this cultural elite. So does an entertainment cadre that oversees television and Hollywood. Corporate managers are elites as well.

There is no racial, regional, religious, or tribal commonality. One shared allegiance perhaps is to higher education that certifies the cultural elite by diplomas of all sorts from a “good school,” as well as a respectable salary and a nice home with appurtenances. The good life of the elite is defined by both the absence of worry about necessities, and a certain status that accrues from properly recognized advanced education and sensitivity.

Well said.  Hanson then goes on to list the characteristics of the American cultural elite:

1) Untruth. One requisite to being a cultural elite, unfortunately, is a certain allegiance to untruth, to saying one thing and doing another. Consider the manifestations of falsity from ecology to race. Often exempt from worry over a weekly check, and distanced from the mechanics of how things work, the elite clamors for a green cap-and-trade revolution. It rejects compromise with a fossil fuel near future that would transition us in a half-century or so to renewable energy.

That said, it is hard to find cultural elites who live green lives. Most use their money at times to fly on jets or boat (like the president this weekend). As in the manner of the tastes of a John Edwards or Al Gore, the bigger and more impressive the home, the better to contemplate how lesser others use too much carbon-based power....

2)  Nature. The cultural elite class tends to romanticize nature, since it has little contact with it. Energy Secretary Steven Chu cheaply announces that California farms will dry up and blow away, with no clue how the tomatoes in his salad or the lamb chops on his plate are grown, cleaned, shipped — and land in his mouth...

3) Muscularity. An elite is often characterized as staying fit entirely by the workout, the gym, the jog — never by chain sawing, digging, climbing, or hammering. Yet here too arises contradiction. The elite, being largely progressive, champion the muscular classes to the degree they can stay distant from them. Having good abs by crunching is far different from having big arms by using a five-foot long pneumatic drill...

4) Gender. Here I am worried, as I have expressed previously, about the marked differences in the way our cultural elite express themselves. Hollywood offers an instructive example. Why can’t any of our actors talk like a Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Bill Holden, or Gregory Peck? I’m not asking for Jack Palance or Fess Parker, just a normal male mainstream voice. I know there are Al Pacinos and Robert De Niros, but they too seem to fade before the new wave of DiCaprios. Elites talk (and probably sound) like the freedmen in Petronius’s Satyricon.

Today’s male’s voice is often far more feminine than that of 50 years ago.

Here I must comment.  I was around show business when the "changes" of the sixties and early seventies, and, boy, is Hanson right.  We went from John Wayne, whose skin really did resemble leather, to Dustin Hoffman and the cult of the boy-actor.  Need we mention Woody Allen.   

I mean, think Gary Cooper.  Then think Leonardo DiCaprio.  The women among our readership will understand.

5) Logic. There is little logic among the cultural elite, maybe because there is little omnipresent fear of job losses or the absence of money, and so arises a rather comfortable margin to indulge in nonsense.

Say it, brother, say it. 

This ad hoc meditation on cultural elitism was all prompted last week by listening to a poor white tree-trimmer lecture me on the various merits of his three different chain saws, while I was talking on the cell phone with a nasal-voiced, snotty Washington reporter — out here south of Fresno — but, in minutes, to be on the way to work at the antipode at Stanford.

Weirdly antithetical two worlds these that we have created.

Read the whole thing.  It's worth it.

July 21, 2010