Lately I’ve been trying to ignore the Democratic presidential contest, figuring that it would just do bad things to my blood pressure. But while channel-surfing one recent evening, I discovered that Sen. Barack Obama had been criticized as a weird elitist. He went into a diner somewhere in Indiana and was offered coffee. He asked for orange juice instead.
To my shame and horror, I realized that I had recently done the very same thing. Martha and I went to tony and exclusive Longmont (it is, after all, in Boulder County) to visit my parents in February. We stayed the night and went out to breakfast with them the next morning. I was already pretty well coffeed up, so when the waitress asked if I wanted coffee, I demurred and said I’d like a big glass of orange juice.
For some reason, she did not alert the management and say, “Roll out the red carpet and go get some Beluga caviar. We’ve got an elitist in here.”
Despite the waitress’ polite refusal to get alarmed by my elitism there, I have been accused of it on several occasions.
After one column that criticized Microsoft Windows and extolled GNU/Linux a couple of years ago, I got an e-mail that said “computer elitists like you just have to be on the cutting edge, don’t you?”
At the time, I was using a home-built machine pieced together from cheap old parts. The “cutting-edge” interface for hard drives then was SATA. Most systems of the day used the EIDE interface. I was using a SCSI host adapter that was made in 1996 to connect with a 40-gigabyte full-height Seagate hard disk. I paid $10 for this clunker drive that was made in 1998. If this was “leading edge,” then a 1954 Chevy sedan is a Porsche Carrera. If cobbling stuff together is a symptom of elitism, then I come from an extended family of “auto elitists.”
However, the model name for that antiquated 6.5-pound hard disk was “Seagate Elite 47,” so I guess I was an Elite-ist.
Another simple way to join the “elite” is to live in a changing town. When we moved to Salida 30 years ago, it was a blue-collar lunch-bucket town where the primary employers were the Climax Molybdenum Mine and CF&I Steel’s Monarch Quarry. Both of them shut down when Ronald Reagan brought joy and prosperity to the American heartland. Salida lost population and real-estate prices plummeted. Empty storefronts abounded downtown.
Over the years, artists moved in, followed by some fairly well-off retirees. The place has gentrified some, to be sure. This may explain the occasional e-mail which says something like, “You elitists in your mountain resort towns have no idea what’s going on in the real world.”
Hey, we had plenty of the “real world” of layoffs and foreclosures in the 1980s. But if staying in the same town for 30 years and living in the same old house for 19 years makes me an “elitist,” then I qualify.
One family-values type, referring to the controversy over Amendment 2 back in 1992, called me a member in good standing of “the Colorado elite.” Perhaps that was a compliment of sorts, but I have trouble remembering my exalted position whenever I get into our 1990 Geo Prizm with the back seat that was chewed up by our unruly mixed-breed mutt. It’s also a problem to recall my elite status when I’m standing in line at Wal-Mart or splitting firewood when it’s 10 below zero.
Perhaps not just anybody can grow up to be president in this country, but apparently anybody can join the elite. It’s as easy as ordering orange juice or just staying put. Fellow elitists, is this a great country or what?
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
