Who's screwing up America - final word

On November 6th I posted a couple of excerpts from the introduction to Bernard Goldberg's fine opus 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Of the hundred listed (no, I won't tell you who they are!) a couple of died and a couple have slid into the memory hole. Most of them, however, are still out there, telling us -- the great unwashed -- how to behave and how to think. Here's part of "A Final Word" from Mr. Goldberg.

For too many years now, the cultural elites have been working overtime trying to portray all those hicks in flyover country as grotesquely distorted fun-house mirror images of who they really are, without the fun part.

If Middle Americans oppose gay marriage, they must be homophobes. If they don't like the sex jokes at eight o'clock at night on network TV, they're squares. If ordinary Americans think gangsta rap is foul and degrading, they're racists who don't understand black culture. If Red State America thinks our "best" universities are dominated by left-wing ideologues, they're anti-intellectual dolts. If they think feminists have gone to far, they're sexists.

What [this] tells us a lot about are the cultural elites themselves, those cloistered liberals who, as Tom Wolfe once put it, "do not have a clue about the rest of the United States" and "who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment."

Yes. Indeed there is. And now, at last, that resentment is being made manifest. With the exception of the "blip" two years ago -- even Walt didn't see that one coming -- Americans (and Canadians) have been showing in the media and, more importantly, at the polls, that they don't see things the way the elites do. Returning to "A Final Word"...

What is it that so many ordinary Americans want? It's actually pretty simple. We want a little more appreciation for the values that most of us -- liberals as well as conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans -- used to take for granted: civility, mutual respect, a semblance of decency and yes, a little old-fashioned love of country too.

The emphasis is mine. Amen.