Towards An Ethos of Snobbery, I Need Your Help

Have you noticed it too? Have you noticed as you go out into the world each day that people are getting more and more annoying? So many people today are simply uncouth, rude, loud, grubby and stupid. And the trend seems to be against the forces of civilized Society. -- Society with a capital “S.”

Recently a woman told me she admired a certain political figure because he was decisive. She is not alone. Instant action is the rule of the day. Men who make snap decisions are looked upon as commanding and strong. We aren’t stopping to think anymore, and we certainly haven’t stopped to think about our assumptions regarding decisiveness. For what value is decisiveness, really, when most decisions are stupid? I submit that the world would be a better place if more people thought and fewer people engaged in decisive action.

But contemplation has been eclipsed by shows of forceful action. Class, refinement, distinction, and erudition have been tossed to the curb along with thoughtfulness.

We need to pull back from the garish brink. We need to acknowledge that living in a consumer society doesn’t mean we must hastily consume whatever second rate, gimcrack gewgaws are thrust at us. They would have you believe that it’s all about “lifestyle.” Snobs don’t have “lifestyles.” Snobs live well, live graciously, live beautifully, live intelligently, and live thoughtfully. The rhetoric of consumer choice is alluring because it seems so downright egalitarian. And to challenge the concept of equality is an explosive risk. But people, I am sorry to break the news to you. Equality is an illusion. There is a difference between Amy Vanderbilt and some slack-jawed lummox who thinks that lighting his farts with a Zippo is droll.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the lummox is any less entitled to human dignity, rights, or happiness. I’m just saying that there is a hierarchy of things that come under the classification of “good living” according to long held cultural traditions.

We need to rescue snobbery from the jaws of the perjorative. Why do people hate snobs? It is because we recognize as signifiers of class association what so-called "elites" believe are universal principals. We understand that hierarchies of class distinction are determined by those who control the signs of social sophistication. The snob seeks to enjoy life by negotiating such structures. We know that there are very few spaces left where culture does not function as capital. Such knowledge endorses the social signs at the same time it threatens the hierarchy by revealing its arbitrary qualities. We snobs should revel in our role. We are mischievious cultural capitalists who understand the limits of our superiority far better than elites.

This is all very rarified and wearying. I need your help. In working towards an Ethos of Snobbery, I invite your input, your comments, your ridicule, and your admiration. Snobs of the World, Unite!

Patchouli versus Champagne

Saturday I went up to Ojai with Meghan Daum for the last reading on her book tour. Her novel “The Quality of Life Report” came out in paperback and her publisher has sent her on the rounds one more time to plug the book. (Allow me to plug it here. Meghan is witty, neurotic, creative, and brilliant – in person and on the page, whether writing fiction or non-fiction.) Ojai is one of those exurban towns an hour or so past the last outposts of overdeveloped Los Angeles but well within reach of overdeveloped Santa Barbara. The town is alluring in the way that any weekend-trip town has allure, and it’s an allure that smells of a little too much patchouli and fudge. When we arrived there was some sort of music festival being held in the little park around which most of the stores on the main street were grouped. The band covered old Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, Little Feat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Eric Clapton tunes and most of the people around --bare-chested jugglers, women in overalls, tie-died moppets -- appeared to be readying themselves for the next Human Be-In. I was in loafers, khakis, and a blue silk shirt; Meghan in a simple black dress. We were marked.

This is where the saving remnant of the Haight-Ashbury exodus has gone. When the hangover faded and the new drug of commodified ideals took over the street corner, they counted their dead and retreated out of the neighborhood, then slipped quietly into small towns and cities all over the west, where the land is a little cheaper, nature a little closer, neighbors a little farther, and the police a little poorer. They moved to Marin and Ojai, Sedona and Tucson, Colorado Springs and Eugene. They set up food cooperatives, sat on community radio station boards, and opened bookstores. They even joined the zoning committee. Now on weekends they import tourists and fresh talent to their yoga retreats, encounter groups, poetry workshops, and book readings. And in the parks the ones too young to remember mimic the aesthetic and mistake the smell of patchouli for enlightenment, or perhaps revolution.

Some of the older ones came into the rear of the bookstore where a coffee bar was set up and where Meghan was now going to read since the originally planned outdoor venue was being overwhelmed by the sounds of “All Along the Watchtower.” The audience consisted of a middle-aged, silver haired, New York refugee in a shapeless, salmon-colored dress with teal patches on it, a couple who used to teach literature at Long Beach State and who derided the Iowa Writers Workshop as “too right-brained,” (a Snob will attempt to avoid the use of the name Iowa at all costs, except when it comes to the Writers Workshop, which is perhaps the best in the nation.), a wiry, frenetic man of about 60 with a Russian mail-order girlfriend 35 years his junior, a loud man with a beard, the bookstore proprietor (a Frenchman with a lazy eye) and his wife, and one radiant young lady in a straw hat who turned out to be from Chippewa Falls.

As Meghan began to read from her novel, the blender from the coffee shop began roaring, followed soon after by the cappuccino machine blowing steam like an old train. Despite this she managed to pull in the audience and after the reading there was a meandering and odd discussion with intermittent proclamations on the meaning of life from the Russophile Lothario and the loud-mouthed, bearded man.

The trouble with all group identification, “Hippie” or “Writer” or “Academic” or even “Snob” is the risk of falling into lockstep with platitudes. The Lothario smugly noted about the interruptions, “a loud child entering the bookstore, hey, that’s just life happening.” But is this pseudo Zen noise what passes for wisdom today? The cornerstone of philosophy is not in the recognition that shrill appliances or misbehaving children are “life happening.” The action of ambience upon awareness is not enlightenment and we should not be too quick to read either the divine or the demonic into the trivial. Sometimes an interruption is merely an interruption.

And what better way to interrupt this thread than with a word on Champagne. As a toast to my inaugural entry into the world of Snobdom, I give you the linked essay on how to choose and enjoy Champagne as a Snob. Consider it a bottle of Dom smashed across the bow of my vessel. My she’s yar, don’t you think?

Platonic Love and Hummers

Last night I drove down to Santa Monica to go out to dinner with Debra. I made my way down the 405 freeway at half past six on a Friday evening with traffic going 70 miles per hour below a Getty Museum glowing with that luminescence peculiar to Los Angeles sunsets. Had a chorus of angels materialized in the sky over San Vicente Boulevard, I could not have been more charmed. Here are some things I saw on San Vicente on the way to Debra’s last night: a stalled caravan of film production vehicles outside the Brentwood Country Club accompanied by a pair of crewmen yelling at each other; a man road-skiing; a Hummer pick-up in camouflage colors. Once I witnessed a chicken walking down Sunset Boulevard, stopping occasionally to peck at the sidewalk. Los Angeles slips out of reach from the categorical grasp.

Everyone needs a friend like Debra: a specimen of humankind, preferably attractive, whose temper fits yours like the fine dovetailed joinery of an old writing table. This person is not just a versatile non-date for the socially active crowd, as vital a function as that may be. Friendship isn’t just a matter of contingency; it’s the silent, smiling acceptance of another’s flaws, sins and heresies that marks the terrain just south of love. Friendship is a conspiracy against convention.

As a snob searching for the best of everything, I am lucky to start off having found the best of friends. Spread across the nation, I have a dozen friends like Debra and most people would be blessed to find even one.

Friendship requires a state of nuance that Hummers--even camouflaged ones--can not approximate. With the Hummer we no longer need to develop road rage. We can purchase it. Its stance is the stance of offense and its design intentionally presumes hostility. But highway despotism is too unrefined for the hauteur elitist who prefers technology evocative of sensuality rather than raw penetration. The Hummer is an FUV not an SUV, and friends don’t let friends drive them. They are for shrews and unrepentant husbands.

And judging from the Hummer population, LA must have plenty of both.

Martin Lawrence and Naked Quotations

Today I went to meet Barbara for lunch at a divey Italian restaurant in Granada Hills. She's at work on a Martin Lawrence film that is shooting up there. It seems Mr. Lawrence has a bold new venture in which he plays a greedy businessman who must do penance for his malfeasance by coaching a youth basketball team filled with losers. (Kenneth Lay, take heed!) This is the kind of dross for which screenwriters are paid extravagant sums of money, and to do what? To produce plots that are the literary equivalent of acid reflux disease.

On the way home I noticed a new office called Trading Partners. Their sign read "We're not emloyees of e-bay." Oh, it had the quotes around it on the sign. Why on earth do people do this? Who are they quoting? I'm pretty sure that phrase is not from Tacitus or Aristotle. Perhaps it's a bon mot from Trollope that's not in my Bartlett's. If you're not an employee of e-bay, do us all a favor and state it on the sign boldly, naked, unburdened by the pomp of authority that comes with fake citations. Can we all please, for the sake of civilized society, abuse our quotation marks correctly?

Now if only Martin Lawrence were sentenced to teach English to a basketball team filled with losers, that would be a plot!