Word: snob
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...Twain vein, taking America and Americans to task: "Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with." Soon afterward Fred Allen followed with his own caustic acid. "He was not brought by the stork," Allen once said about a heritage-happy snob. "He was brought by a man from the Audubon Society personally." During the Depression, Allen recommended setting up "a crumb line for midgets." His friendly enemy, Jack Benny, was not far from Twain's platform personality in a radio skit in which he was held up by a burglar: Thief...
...always something of a snob. As Prime Minister, he was constantly darting off to London for receptions and ceremonies, test matches at the fashionable Marylebone Cricket Club, and the Commonwealth Conference ("I make a few statesmanlike remarks. The eminent gentlemen of the civil service, who have already written the ultimate communiqué, say, 'Yes, that was a good point...
Where is the snobbery then? It lies in the fact that the New Snob has little interest in or sympathy for people who are not members of the currently fashionable minority groups. The most fashionable minority, of course, is the American Negro, and quite properly so, for Negroes suffer the greatest discrimination and deprivation in our society. Puerto Ricans and the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant residents of Appalachia are also -- again, quite properly -- fashionable groups to champion. (The best index of fashionability is probably the number of articles about the group in the New York Times Magazine.) Other groups, however...
...faults of New York's Mayor Lindsay, it seems to me, is that he is himself something of a New Snob. He is quite commendably concerned with the problems of Negroes and Puerto Ricans, and he seems to have a genuine sympathy for them and a real understanding of the tremendous problems they face. But nowhere in any of his statements or in the various celebrations of him that have been filling the New York and national press lately can I find much evidence of a sympathy with the less, but still somewhat, unfortunate groups in the city...
...root of much of the New Snobbery, it seems to me, lies in a desire to separate American society neatly into the Oppressed and the Oppressors. This is not particularly difficult, because certain groups, Negroes for example, are by any standards oppressed. The New Snob then consigns most other groups to the ranks of the Oppressors; hence Irish-Americans, a large percentage of whom are casual bigots, are Oppressors, and that is all there...