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Although great strides have been made toward an America that doesn't discriminate on grounds of race, religion, national origin and the like, certain forms of discrimination remain acceptable.
Consider the plight of one Jim Minx, who lives in an upscale Chicago suburb named Flossmoor (perhaps the village was developed by a dentist, since that's what dentists always tell you).
Minx drives a pickup, which he parks in his driveway. In Flossmoor the beautiful, that's a $10 offense, and Minx has accumulated $200 worth of such tickets, mostly on account of one Richard Rosenthal, a public-spirited resident who photographs offending vehicles and provides that evidence to the police.
Minx thinks Rosenthal is a snob. Rosenthal says I
don't care what he thinks, but don't come to my community
and try to debase it with his damned truck. . . . I moved
to the community because it was beautiful, quiet,
upper-class. . . . And I've seen it weakened by so-called
liberal attitudes.
Here we thought George Bush had utterly vanquished the liberals last year, and here those damn liberals are, turning up again like bad pennies. Are these the same liberals who fought against restrictive covenants 40 years ago? The ones who pushed for the widely-disobeyed laws against racial discrimination by mortgage lenders?
Probably not. The worst nightmare an American liberal can conjure is some good-ol'-boy redneck in a pickup; it's easier to imagine Teddy Kennedy as a lifetime NRA member than it is to believe that The New Republic will come out in support of the civil rights of pickup owners next week.
Further, the belief that a man can do what he wishes
with his property -- such as parking his own vehicle in his
own driveway -- sounds like hard-core American
conservatism, not a so-called liberal attitude.
The
political spectrum sure is vague these days.
But as a bleeding-heart knee-jerk pickup owner, I'd like to see Minx come out on top here. One way might be to organize a boycott, whereby pickups never venture where they're not welcome.
That way Rosenthal and his like-minded snooty friends can enjoy their upscale homes, serene in the knowledge that no ugly vehicles will mar the panoramic vista from the solarium. They can also maintain their expensive houses without the services of carpenters, plumbers, electricians and other tradesmen who drive those unsightly low-life trucks.
Or Minx should start his own suburb. Upscale folks apparently don't like to live around the rest of us, and I, for one, feel the same way about them.
They're hard to live around. I don't care who parks next to my pickup because I wouldn't notice if a car door swung wide and put another dent in a fender. But Audi drivers suffer coronaries over such trifling matters.
You let rich people into your neighborhood, and suddenly you have no leisure time. They can afford to hire gardeners for their sprawling estates, but they will hold you to the same standard: a lawn as green and smooth as a snooker table, with sculptured shrubs and alabaster fountains. They don't know that yards are supposed to be used for storing firewood and car parts, and they get upset about some little thing like a refrigerator on the porch.
Once a school gets integrated with a few rich kids, your own kids lose interest in hopscotch, tag and Wal-Mart. They start asking for things like their own $5000 37-inch Toshiba color TV sets, $800 Diamondback bicycles and the entire fall line from Esprit.
I'm open-minded enough so that I probably wouldn't object if my daughter married one. But they're a bad influence. Have you ever seen a poor person make an illegal campaign contribution or get five senators to pull strings to halt a federal investigation? And did you ever hear of a poor person taking pictures of his neighbor's driveway and then calling the police?
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