This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

This Redneck to Mr. Judge: "Yer an Idiot"

Seems a certain Mark Gauvreau Judge has his designer boxer briefs in a bunch over "the so-called common-man culture celebrated by the Right."

Gauvreau?! Gimme a break! And what's with the three names, huh? How 'bout M. G. Judge.

But I digress.

Mr. Judge laments:

I fully realized I'm a conservative metrosexual -- let's call me a metrocon for short -- a few weeks ago. The Gretchen Wilson song "Redneck Woman" came on the radio. This tune, a hard-charging boogie-woogie number, is a celebration of crude behavior, a kind of red-state aria of defiance against the staid, snobby, and civilized. The woman in the song boasts about shopping at Wal-Mart, keeping the Christmas lights on the house all night long, and standing in the front yard barefoot "with a baby on my hip."

I had an immediate, visceral hatred of the song. It represented the one thing I truly cannot stand about modern conservatism: its defense of anything dumb, tacky, and second-rate, as long as it comes from "the people." The common man is deified by the right.

Mr. Judge goes on to lament the elevation of NASCAR ("a bunch of rednecks makin' left turns") and WWF ("a 'sport' even apes laugh at ") as sports. It's so--you must imagine an involuntary sniff here--mediocre. All those common folk just remain so, well, common.

What they need is a good dose of self-improvement.

I just wish that the attempts at self-improvement common among the masses up until the 1960s hadn't gone out of style. People once read Reader's Digest to keep up with the best books and thinkers. They felt guilty about not understanding classical music. They shamed those who dressed like pigs. In his masterpiece Transformation in Christ, the great theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand claimed that there are two phases of growth for the human person. The first is physical, and the second spiritual. After the physical growth stops, the human person starts to grow towards God. This, in Hildebrand's view, entails a growth in appreciation of, among other things, aesthetic beauty and the arts. It means going from pop music tunes to symphonies, from blue jeans to slacks, from Old Spice to Polo. It means trying to improve yourself.

So, when it gets right down to it, what amounts to self-improvement for Mr. Judge is based largely on the fabrics with which one drapes one's body and how that body smells.

Am I being too harsh? Here's Mr. Judge's account of his own self-improvement.

Yet when I sobered up and became a conservative -- which also meant a return to Christianity -- I began to experience the second growth that von Hildebrand speaks of. I went from Levis and punk rock to Saks and swing dancing. I poured out the Old Spice and went to Nordstrom's for a bottle of Truefitt and Hill of London (founded, the bottle reminds us, in 1805, when Lord Nelson won the great battle at Trafalgar). I stopped wearing sneakers and white socks. Like George Will -- a Hall of Fame metrocon -- I began to prefer baseball to football. And I never stopped liking Woody Allen films -- yes, I call them films. I didn't stop growing -- in fact, this was when I started growing. Soon, "Red Neck Woman" seemed like an embarrassing Bible Belt banshee wail.

So, for Mr. Judge, the Hildebrandian move from physical growth to spiritual growth is that from cheap cologne, socks and sneakers, football, and calling them "movies," to imported cologne, wingtips and baseball and "films."

Got it.

There is a large difference between an understanding of the best in music and literature and thought from throughout human history, and an affectation of style which uses such music, literature and thought as so much window dressing. And really, if the cultured enjoyment of a Bach fugue, or Ciceronian oration, or Plato's myth of the cave, does not result in a life of virtue, the cultured elitist is even more barbaric than the barbarian.

But of course, having been lured in by my post title and having now seen my exposure of Mr. Judge--did anyone notice that this came from The American Spectator?--you should at this point realize Mr. Judge's sniffing lament is satire. It is Mr. Judge's way, one supposes, of highlighting how the blue zip codes look at pretty much the rest of us.

I happen to think Mr. Judge captures this elitism quite well.

(And on the off chance this ain't satire, well, Mr. Judge, yer an idiot. Now where's my Jeff Foxworthy DVD?)

Posted by Clifton at February 2, 2006 08:57 AM | TrackBack