Fran Leibowitz (among others) said that love is a mental illness. So you can only imagine what sort of pathologies self-love can sink to.
    Hold that thought, and think about the seemingly unrelated notion of "class"; high class, low class, middle class, upper class, working class, de classe, low-born, high-born. Even "caste", belongs in this list since it really is no different from how many people of the upper classes see themselves versus others, as a birthright rather than a mark of merit or personal achievement.
    If a red clay dirt farmer in east Tennessee would rather listen to Mozart than Earl Scruggs, is he of a higher class, or, as some might say, only aping the tastes of his betters? Or are only his tastes for music of a higher class? Maybe he still wipes his nose on his shirt sleeve.
    I've always considered honesty to be a "high class" attribute, so where does that place the political class vis a vis that Tennessee farmer? Who's higher than who?
  
    This self-perception has a lot to do with how class is perceived in America. Earlier in 2008 I wrote a long piece, "Frank Capra Was Right, It's All About Class" which provides good background as to where I'm going here.
    America is a middle class society. Period. I was talking with an old Boston Irish couple, old lefties in fact, and they saw class entirely through the lens of income; money in the bank. I told them that Bill Gates is middle class, and they were appalled. I said, "He still eats hamburgers. You know of any place you can get a thousand dollar hamburger? He started his business in a garage."
    Is Ozzie Osborne upper class? How about Mick Jagger? P-Diddie Combs? Mark Teixiera? They all have plenty of money.
    Western civilization is supposed to have been passed on through the arts and letters of Europe, as the highest expressions of civilization. (I agree...to a point.) Not bank accounts.
    There's not an English schoolboy, no matter how deep his Cockney, who doesn't recognize Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik".  In America the only way you'd recognize it would be it had been used to plug a feminine hygiene spray.
    But the French, by the 12th Century, had already decided that no matter how well you refined your tastes in wine, music, arts, architecture, if you didn't have a bloodline to go along with it, you were only bourgeois. Remember Simon the Jew in Ivanhoe? He had to sneak in the back door just so he could loan the  Prince John money! So you can imagine what that line of thinking "thinks" about Bill Gates. They all wish they had his money, but it will take generations for him to establish a bloodline that is worthy of club membership by European standards. Hell, the Merovingians (you know, Pepin the Short, Clovis and that bunch) still look upon the Carolingians (Charlemagne) as a bunch of upstarts.
    What does America have to counter that kind of lineage? The Van Rensselears of New York?...who arose from a Dutch tradesman and storekeeper a mere 350 years ago, just two generations ahead of the farmers Rockefeller and Roosevelt. And Irish gutter trash like the Kerrys and Kennedys would be another century and a half getting started with their royal lines. You can just imagine the peat bogs and potato patches they emerged from.
    How's about we track the Wallace Beery clan, or the Barrymores? (Alas, bum-stabbers like Elton John and pillow biters like Rosie O'Donnell, their royal line begins and ends with themselves. No pun intended.)
    The point is, by any measure, money or a taste for fine arts, scratch an American "upper class" member and I'll show you a storekeeper or farmer. In truth, scratch a Merovingian and I'll show you a man who bathed once a year, and ate pork off an open spit with a butcher's knife...just don't tell the French.
   
     Even though the Constitution is generally against it, many Americans want to create royal bloodlines, and believe it or not, that has always been at the core of Left versus Right political fight in the country. ALL leftist thinking in America is class and elitist based, and sadly, (due I believe to the rise of the Pop Culture) many so-called conservatives have signed on to the leftist view.
     So, just how "base" is this elitist thinking, really?
     It's a natural enough desire to want to be able to wear the appurtenances of class, especially for the children of storekeepers. But what they use as frames of reference are not so much the arts and higher civilization of Europe, as the imagery, which Americans mostly get from film.
     If you like great period "costume" films, you know, the ones filmed on location in 19th Century Paris, London, Vienna, or the English countryside, the heroes and heroines almost always are of the upper classes. Or move among them.
     Where does America fit into these films? Pick any scene on London streets, the hero and heroine walking along, he looking like Johnny Walker (black label) and she like Emma Thompson. The Americans? They are all those people in the background, in drab, tattered work clothes, carrying packages or bales, or selling flowers. As the French would say, America is the backdrop to real class.
     Some people say that Karl Marx discovered the working classes, but in fact Dickens was years ahead of him...and far more
sympathetic. And Jane Austen was ahead of Dickens. Marx hated capitalists much more than he liked the proletariat (indeed, he didn't care one whit for them), and Dickens felt more sympathy than outrage at the condescension of the gentry class. Neither wanted to abolish class...exactly. Dickens wanted to expand the obligations of noblesse oblige, into a kinder, gentler aristocracy, while Marx simply wanted to replace one ruling class with another. In the end, his view won, only using the imagery of Dickens to get there. England, indeed Europe, is much more Marxist than it is Dickensian. They rather like the idea of a base society in their midst.
     But until the 19th Century almost no one noticed the lower classes...at all. ALL ART was dedicated to the people with money, and who could pay, and that frames how we perceive culture and class today. Makes sense.
     No one among the poor ever wrote...most didn't know how...so no one knew, or really wanted to know, what their hopes and dreams were. No cared about their underlying virtues.
     But wait, the people who first came to America and populated it were not of this sort. Oh, they were genuine tabula rosae, when it comes to the fine arts of class in Europe. Yet they were middle class. If you learn anything about the European precursors to the Pilgrims and Virginia colonists, know that they came from a new middle class stock of England, not the dregs of society.
     But after them, in wave after wave, came the very detritus of Europe's sewers; criminals, vagabonds, failed farmers, poor of every ilk. Most of those "losers" who Europe encouraged to leave their shores for uncertain futures and near certain poverty, are the shoulders we all now stand on today. (FYI)
     Look back to say 1940, and Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in "Pride and Prejudice". Jane Austen wrote that novel ladened with class overtones, yet never once descended to the lower or even lower middle classes to make her case. Her story was all about upper class pretensions versus gentry class aspirations. It was a perfect costume play, with nary an American (as Europe saw us) in the film. The domestic help were scarcely in the film.
     Now, imagine a waitress in Broken Bow, Oklahoma paying her 25 cents to see that film. She looks around town and sees one big house, owned by the family that owns the one grainary, a bunch of small stores, one paved tree-lined street of nicer houses, the rest little more than huts built in willy-nilly fashion along dirt streets. This is 1940 mind you, not 1880.
     She sees "Pride and Prejudice" and thinks "That's for me", and "That" surely ain't here in Broken Bow.
     Well, where is "That"? Could be Omaha, Wichita, St Louis, and some went there, seeking "That". But most trails led west to California, and on the first Greyhound that came through after she'd saved her $4.32, she was on it.
     In another five years, she's could be back in Broken Bow, broke, or still waiting tables, only in Pomona, or possibly just taking her last paycheck from a defense plant. Maybe she met a Marine at the Stage Door Canteen. Maybe he died on Iwo Jima. Or, maybe he's back and they have a little nest and a kid in Ventura. And maybe, just maybe, that one in one-hundred thousand shot, she's got a job at Warner Brothers as a line dancer behind Carmen Miranda, with fruit salad on her head.
     All we know is that in 99.9% of the cases, "That" turned out to be an illusion, and our common-sense American girl who fell in love with the imagery of class, never having really known its under-lying priggish substance, eventually settled into whatever life threw her way. Some came away sad, some embittered, but most only wiser for the journey. A few, the whores, became reformed, married lawyers and went on to found the feminist movement in America. But this is America, so most ended up happy anyway, as life in general always looked upward for ordinary Americans in those days.

     Well, that film was re-released in 2005. Different cast, of course, but the siren's song continues. Or does it?   
     We now have a political class that embraces completely the European political view of class, only, it still embraces just that shallow cultural imagery of class....as a costume, something that is just out there, waiting to grasped, but only to be grasped by the precious few.
     Moses Sands said many years ago that this is the French view of class, that most of the people have to live in some level of degraded life, so as to make those who are above it seem more illuminated and self-important. "It makes absolutely no sense to be of a superior class if you have no one to lord it over." Sadly, Peggy Noonan seems to have joined that chorus.
     These are the bitter clingers, for they cling to a view in which they always are in the foreground of whatever costume play is being enacted on the national stage, while all the rest of us are in the background, lifting that bale and towing that barge.
     This is self-love, and it is what drives the politics of the Left.
Vassar Bushmills