Last night witnessed the ugly eruption of no-nothingism among conservative Tweeters.
While we’ve established that the Super Bowl does not in fact cause an upsurge in wife beating, it does seem to make some people not just stupid, but proudly so.
According to these sages, The Who are too old/not “relevant”/not “American enough to provide appropriate half time entertainment.
One wag tweeted, “What? Was the Glenn Miller Band unavailable?”
So… were it possible by some miracle to have the Glenn Miller Band play the Super Bowl, you would have objected because they were… “old and irrelevant”?
Seriously?
It is particularly disturbing to read such eruptions from Americans who call themselves “conservatives.”
There is nothing particularly “conservative” about having not only a disdain for the “old” and the “foreign,” but bragging about one’s disdain, and ignorance, in public.
These tweeters sounded awfully much like those untalented would-be contestants on American Idol who huff off mumbling, “What do those judges know, anyhow?”
Well, they are music industry professionals, and you are a talentless dimwit.
But alas, it seems that even conservatives of a certain age have been infected with that very — I hate to say it — American “self-esteem gone wild” disease that presents with a particularly unattractive combination of arrogance and ignorance, people who seem rather put out when faced with any reminder that history didn’t begin the year they were born.
America is the greatest country in the world. But when stupid people say that, they are too stupid to even realize that they are undermining their own assertions.
They are like those white supremacists who prattle on about “white culture” but couldn’t spell “Beethoven” if you held a gun to their head — or figure it was that movie about a big dog.
There used to be an equally American tradition of wanting to better oneself, since doing so in class-driven England was frowned upon, if not almost impossible.
(Note the bit at the very bottom of this story, in which even in 2010, the Brit in question was slagged — behind his back, naturally– for having dared to “rise above his station…”)
Also this week, this dreadful no-nothing mental habit — a sort of cultural halitosis — was on display in this comments thread, in which a number of “conservatives” seemed rather proud of the fact that they had never heard of Werner Herzog. (A thread which I seem to have brought to an abrupt conclusion.)
I can absolutely guaran-****ing-tee you that Mark Steyn and Tom Wolfe and Jonah Goldberg and PJ O’Rourke know who Werner Herzog is.
My family is working class. I didn’t go to college. And I know who Werner Herzog is.
I’m not saying you have to like him. But yes, you should know who he is, or at the very least, not brag about the fact that you don’t.
If you haven’t seen a film older than Star Wars, you are a dimwit. And your aversion to subtitles is the adult equivalent of a child turning up his nose at an olive.
You are the reason people write articles like this one.
Please carry on being an uncultured slug.
However, if you could keep it to yourself, we’d all be a lot better off.
