[ExI] What a classy guy!

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat



 

>…  What a classy guy! 

 

 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uGKtihX1U4> You Know Who defecates on a crowd from plane while wearing a crown

 

John K Clark

 

 

 

 

Classy for sure, but whenever I am told I have no class, I point out very much on the contrary: low is a class.

 

Sooner or later, some politician comes along who understands how to appeal to the lower classes to win popular approval, which is how the current white house occupant (whose name I cannot recall) is the most popular POTUS in the 21st century, by a comfortable margin (details available on request.)  Reason: there are more low and middle class people than upper class.

 

How else can we explain the enormous crowds gathered by the “sport” organized by the organization known as “World Wrestling Entertainment” please?  What do Europeans think when they see American masses being entertained by the profound absurdity of enormous men pretending to beat each other?  The mind boggles.  

 

Second fun aside: the current VP is from the lower classes.  Reason I know: I am related to the current VP three different ways (hey, Kentucky.)  That guy understands how to harness the appeal to the lower and middle classes better than even the current POTUS and understands, for that is where the votes are.

 

Third fun aside: check out Vance’s disturbingly entertaining book Hillbilly Elegy.  I loved it, because I know wherewithal he speaks.  I don’t have addiction in my own family, but addiction is a huge problem in modern Appalachia.  It appears to be getting worse.  

 

Vance’s book is not a comedy, but if you understand the tragic culture from which it is written, it has a ring of truth to it.  Hillbilly Elegy is about how he grew up in a family profoundly screwed up by addiction, but the US Marines took him in and taught him how to be human.  The Marines are good at that.  JD’s tenure at Yale Law School led to some very fun cultural dissonance, reminiscent in some ways of Richard Feynman’s experience at MIT and Princeton (as related in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.)  

 

Fourth fun aside: I was at a retirement ceremony for our scoutmaster last week.  He is a private pilot aircraft owner and manager of two airports, so most of his friends are other aircraft-owning pilots (and that class of people (assuming you picture the meaning of that comment.))  The party was at an elegant restaurant, so it was easy to see he spent a cubic buttload of money on that dinner for 80 at a place where my own bride and I would seldom go even as a couple.  The honoree invited several of the scout families, so we all sat together.  

 

When the dinner was served, we were unfamiliar with all the proper protocols or what to do when there are multiple forks and glasses for each setting at the table.  Since we are friends, we cheerfully ridiculed our inexcusable ignorance of such upper-middle class pretentions.  We know how to survive in the wilderness, but are generally ignorant of which fork, which glass and which plate are the proper ones be used for what purpose.  Hilarity ensued.  All that upper class stuff seems quite wasteful to those of us who recite regularly the virtue of eschewing such ostentatious extravagance (…thrifty, brave, clean, reverent…)  

 

At the cheerfully awkward dinner, I suggested that we should not be too hard on ourselves, for the all the protocol for formal dining were invented by European upper classes, specifically English nobility, whose social structure we Yanks violently rejected long ago.  We Americans would look several percent less like primitive savages, had the British nobles’ dining protocols never been imported to start with.  Perhaps they too should have been hurled into the harbor with the imported tea.  Our Yankee dining manners would have been so much simpler, so much easier to master had they been invented not by British nobility but rather by the Cookie Monster.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20251021/d60b7be2/attachment.htm>