Erstwhile regular guy outs himself via elite confessional over-share (fail)
Words & images © Paul Ransom
What does it mean to be a snob? What if I don’t vibe with the other 99%? Is it okay not to like the Marvel franchise? These and other conundrums will, obliquely, be teased apart below, as a former ‘man of the people’ comes to terms with the shameful fact that he is now a card carrying, Illuminati sympathising, class traitor.
Grocery buying. That’s when the truth dropped, like a bunch of broccolini, into the hand basket of painful acceptance. As the aisles around me heaved with overweight, nasal-voiced shoppers piling soft drinks and fluffy white bread into their already bulging trolleys, and their squawking children pulled chocolate bars from shelves of sugary excess, something inside me broke. My long-cherished connection to the heart and soul of ‘we the people’ was unravelling at the speed of yet another ‘locked & dropped’ pay/wave purchase.
NB: One of the ways you can tell I have become an elite mouthpiece is that I use ‘single quote marks’ a lot; as well as NB, which is Latin in origin, and thus indicative of an unconscious bias for Romanesque obfuscation. (See, I can’t help myself.)
As you can imagine, my supermarket epiphany fell like a hammer blow. For decades I had been operating under the illusion that I was sprinkling the salt of the earth on my super-sized fries, only to discover, with a gut wrenching spike of shame, that it was pink Himalayan rock salt all along, and that my fries were really ethically sourced, steamed organic vegetables.
If I were not such a godless existentialist, I would be on my knees praying for absolution. Please Lord, help me be a decent, down to earth member of my local community. Let me return to the bosom of the battling majority. Remind me again of the primacy of family values.
But no – instead, I left the aforementioned ‘village’, (aka, giant carpark with clutch of bonus shops), and beheld with a knot of dread the slow, encroaching lava field of the brand new suburb being built across the freshly sealed road. With a soul-deep shudder I remembered the burbs of my youth; similarly plonked on the fringes of a city, gobbling up farmland to make way for the nationally branded, quarter acre dream. Oh Lord, if only I had seen dream, and not nightmare.
Then, as the plus-sized parents and their rotund replacements tumbled their plunder into sparkling SUVs and sped off to consume microwaved tubs of goop in front of their enormous televisions, I was forced, by the crushing gravity of evidence, to make a full confession.
Principled, democratically inclined humanist I was not. Snide, self-righteous snobbery was my default. Elites were my people.
I would have plunged to the tarmac in abject misery if not for the fact that I have lately developed a snooty aversion to certain kinds of paving. Instead, I scurried, like the guilty thought criminal I knew I was, to roll around in the mud in the back garden of the unsuspecting friends I am presently house sitting for. (If only they knew there was an evil elitist stroking the resident pussy at night, they would surely cut short their hard-earned holiday and eject me from their lovely, dreamy home.)
Do I feel soiled? Of course. In the newly evened playing field of the post-truth zeitgeist, I remain infected with a toxic hauteur. And if you don’t know what ‘zeitgeist’ and ‘hauteur’ mean, I’m ashamed to say I no longer care. To me, the digital democracy is a dumbed down domain.
Oh, the hypocrisy, you cry, noting with an egalitarian snigger that this piece is part of the online shout-off. Even as I mount the soap box gifted to me by the People’s Republic of Internet, I feel tempted, as if by some analogue Beelzebub, to trash the temple of the golden meme.
Viral I am not. Diseased I surely am.
Though I seek to assuage my sins with words like ‘discerning’ and ‘nuanced’ I know the esteem-shattering truth. I am a transgressor. An anachronism. An absurd and piteous relic of an old world order. Clinging pathetically to peer review over share stats. Preferring books to 280 characters. Not once having grabbed a coffee from Starbucks. In fact, so wretched is my superiority complex that I still cannot figure out what everyone loved about Michael Jackson. (Kinda funky sometimes, but not that great.)
However, before you vote me off your feed, fellow humans, allow me one last appeal to your better angels.
Elitism is like an addiction. Smack for snobs. You can pack me off to purgatory if you wish, or you can forgive me my high & mighty cravings and help me find my way back to you. I want to belong. Really I do. Please don’t other me.
For only with your good old fashioned, common sense help can I ever hope to drain the swamp of my conceit.
Maybe you will never make me great again – perhaps because I was always average – but I will gladly accede to the vox populi rather than stay stranded in the cold eyrie of elite monologue. Up here, with only figure hugging black outfits and ominously purring pets for company, the vista may be panoramic, but the view is chilling. Looking down your nose can give you vertigo.
Bad luck, buddy, I hear you chorus…as I wipe a solitary tear from my cheek and watch you recede into the distance, only pausing to fire one last missile of contempt over your collective shoulders.
Seriously, elitism is so fin de siècle.
I know, right. Kill me now.
Postscript:
In yet another sign of unrepentant elite proclivity, here is a disingenuous disclaimer.
Some of you will have observed my earlier remarks about weight with understandable chagrin. You will likely accuse me of fat shaming. By way of recompense allow me now to indulge in a moment of skinny shaming.
To (mis?) quote the great Charles Laughton from the 1960 film Spartacus, “Have you noticed that tyrants are invariably thin?”
Quod erat demonstrandum.
As If You Were Listening 