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Vice-president Al Gore's acceptance speech at the
Democratic National Convention last week was so odd that it
occasioned much criticism. The oddity was that we heard a
Democrat actually talking like a Democrat, rather than a
corporate shill. The criticism, mostly from right-thinking
types, included an accusation that Gore was inciting,
perhaps even practicing, class warfare.
However, none of the conservative commentary that I saw
bothered to defined class warfare
-- i.e., were
these social or economic classes, and just how do they
battle among themselves. So I turned to my favorite inside
source, Ananias Ziegler, media relations director for the
Committee that Really Runs America.
The first thing to remember,
he said, is that
officially, America does not have any classes, other than
one called 'middle,' which covers everything. Even if your
father was a senator or president, and even if your family
has enough money to send you to an Ivy League school, you
still present yourself as 'middle-class' if you're running
for president.
So if America is all one big happy socio-economic class, how could there be class warfare?
Good question,
he replied, and then proceeded to
avoid answering it. I'll have to confess that at the
Committee, we haven't done our homework on the class
warfare question, so I don't have formal definitions for
you.
I was about to hang up. Then he made an offer. Why
don't you give me some examples, and I'll tell you whether
they constitute class warfare or not.
That sounded interesting, so I began by asking whether it was class warfare to portray people who hike on public lands as elitists, while people who roared across the woods on expensive toys were down-home salt-of-the-earth types.
Stirring up resentment among people who can afford
$25,000 spewts against people who can afford $50 hiking
shoes -- maybe it sounds like class warfare, but it really
isn't,
he said. It's just good old American
egalitarianism, like opposing those oppressive elitists who
listen to public radio.
I then asked whether it was class warfare when the richest man in the world used his effective monopoly on computer operating systems to build a monopoly in applications software, and along the way, destroying smaller companies by withholding interface information and crushing them with his marketing clout.
No, that's not class warfare,
Ziegler said.
And any attempt to fight against that is known as
'punishing someone for being too successful.'
Just before I called Ziegler, my day had been interrupted by yet another solicitation call from a long-distance company. Is it an act of class warfare, I asked, when a huge multinational company uses my telephone to take up my time to try to sell me its goods?
No, that's free speech in action,
Ziegler said.
Now, if you were to fight back, say by finding their
boiler room and snipping all its lines, then it would be a
federal crime, as well as a stupid act of class warfare.
Don't you understand that big companies are allowed to prey
on you, and that's not an act of class warfare?
No, I didn't understand that, but I can be pretty dense about some things, so I tried another question.
Suppose there are people living in homes and apartments that they can afford. And then an army invades their neighborhood, and they all became homeless. Would that be an act of war?
I see where you're headed with this, Quillen. You're
trying to get me to say that the bomb would be warfare, and
so it would follow that an invasion by People of Money that
makes those people homeless would also be an act of class
warfare. I'm not going to fall for that one. Can't you
get it through your thick skull that it's class warfare
only when people fight back?
So if someone has his boot on my throat, that's normal, but if I try to push it off, it's class warfare?
I wouldn't put it so crudely,
he concluded,
but I'm glad to see that I'm finally getting through to
you about what is and isn't class warfare in
America.
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