I Am America's Enemy
 

December 20 2004
Counterbias.com
Marc Krug
 

On this site, I feel safe in admitting it — I am a member of that vast, unspeakably villainous group, the “intellectual elite.” As some see it, I am also America’s enemy.

The reason why I am considered an enemy is not difficult to discover. Far too many conservative columnists and standard bearers hold the “intellectual elite” responsible for nearly all of this country’s societal and governmental faults, failures, and malfunctions. As these conservatives see it, we are the depraved individuals who daily render the lives of millions of Americans largely unlivable.

We are said to lack the core values whose governance would otherwise make America the moral nation it should be. It is because of our amorality and jaded sensibilities that Hollywood has successfully laid its morally corrupting tentacles across America. And most damningly, we spend all our idle moments thinking of ways to remove God from public America — whether it be the classroom, the courthouse, the city square, or the nation’s currency.

Reputedly, we wrote the labyrinth of government regulations that cripples free enterprise and encumbers the economy. Our environmental obsessions have prevented America from doing what’s necessary to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. And some of us have grown rich by taking large portions of the outrageous settlements routinely awarded in court cases.

And should we be college teachers, we represent a special threat: we are the evildoers who reputedly fill the heads of young Americans with liberal ideas and other dangerous notions. Reputedly, we are using the classroom as a forum for indoctrination, striving relentlessly to turn innocent adolescents into apostates — non-believers in America’s traditional values.

Most amazingly, we accomplish all of this during those rare moments when we were not swilling down lattes and driving Volvos.

As to why the “intellectual elite” deserve such condemnation, one has only to listen to the Fox network’s talking heads. On our better days, they refer to us as “pinheads;” on our worse ones, they accuse us of giving aid and comfort to the enemy in Iraq.

Admittedly, non-conservative voices can make themselves heard, such as at this site. But during the last few years, it seems that on certain matters — particularly, the identity of society’s heroes and villains —the conservative critics have been the ones most often heard and most readily believed.

They are heard and believed by many in the heartland who are decidedly upset with the way that life is treating them. They know there is something horribly amiss when their salaries don’t increase but prices do and when they have to make choices between how well they furnish their homes and how well they dress their children.

Moreover, they are afraid. With each passing year, the percentage of those who fear that they might  lose their job goes up. For the most part, they have good reason to be afraid: chances are, they either know, or are related to, someone who has lost their job.

If they are like many Americans, they quite often live from paycheck to paycheck and cannot save enough to survive any period of protracted hardship. Additionally, many are dangerously in debt and occasionally approach bankruptcy.

Many have a second or third mortgage and realize that foreclosure is not an impossibility. Furthermore, almost half of them lack health insurance and understand that any prolonged stay in a hospital would result in crippling debt.

In fact, many conservatives live poor but vote rich. Unfortunately, they just re-elected the most economically ineffectual President to emerge in nearly a century. And they just re-elected many congressmen who previously voted for legislation that benefited big business while also harming their constituents’ financial health.

But despite all of this evidence, conservatives seem incapable of connecting the hardships they endure with the politicians responsible for creating those hardships. Nor do they hold George Bush or any Republican congressman accountable for the misery they have left in their wake.

On the contrary, they believe that Bush and his fellow Republicans have striven tirelessly to make America a better place, only to see their efforts stymied by the Liberals in Congress and elsewhere. In fact, many of them still blame Clinton for what is wrong in America.

But even with Clinton and his kind no longer in power, conservatives believe that enemy elites still lurk in America. These elites invariably belong to one intellectual group or another, and can be quite easily recognized by their consummate knowledge of academic trivia and their benighted ignorance of all that’s truly important in this world.

And like all good scapegoats, these elites are by nature untrustworthy and — most importantly — distinctly different, if not entirely foreign, from the common man.

Most conservatives already know how to identify members of this elite. They merely look for someone with certain letters after their names — whether it be “PhD”, indicating a college teacher or some high-powered professional, or “JD”, indicating an attorney-at-law.

In other words, they can label someone as a member of this enemy elite by the mere fact that they are either a professor, a lawyer, or some high-powered administrator. It is a forgone conclusion that members of these professions are by nature, liberals.

That this naive classificatory system seems prejudicial and overly simplistic is beside the point. In this exercise, few of the true believers are actually thinking for themselves.

They are letting Fox News do that for them.
 

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