Friday, July 22, 2005
Friday Guilty Pleasures Blogging:
Snobbery
Let me just say upfront, before you raise your hackles and hiss at me, that I do not indulge this guilty pleasure by choice. I really don't like being a snob, and don't think I usually am. At the same time, one must be honest and admit the truth: there is great evil pleasure to be taken from feeling superior to others.One of my main rules of life: Everybody's a snob about something. This is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive rule; there's nothing to be done about it, no action indicated, no doctor or other agent of public safety to be consulted. It's just the way things are.
The key phrase in that rule of life is about something. I don't think I've ever met a Perfect Snob (Sebastian Junger should investigate that), and am certain I wouldn't like such a person if I had met her. But everybody is (or fancies himself) better, in at least one respect, than at least one other person.
So what do I often feel snobbish about?
- Spelling, grammar, punctuation: I love to catch someone using "it's" instead of "its," or "their" (or for that matter "there") instead of "they're"; to stumble upon a chronic dangler of modifiers; to read or hear that a woman has spent some time in the beauty pallor, or that someone "could care less" when they mean (and they always mean) exactly the opposite. Hearing that someone has "honed in on" some truth can drive me insane. (You can probably imagine that I take a great deal of pleasure in this feature alone of The Weasel's way of doing business.) Of course, against all of this must be weighed the tremendous mortification felt when I make one of these mistakes myself. Thank God Blogger lets me correct these abominations without announcing the update to the world.
- Politics: It's weird how committed I am to the idea that we're all in this together, we must all respect one another's points of view, and so on -- yet I can't help feeling a little reflexively smug shot of adrenalin when I hear or read some wingnut's latest delusional rambling.
- Movies: Not until I was a sophomore in college did I encounter the lowercase-c "catholic"; it came from a professor, describing her taste in one or another artistic medium. Some media appeal to me unpredictably -- I like some high- and some low- and some middle-brow books, for example, but am never even tempted to open some books.* Movies are the special case for me, the I-like-'em-all medium. (Exceptions: Dead Ringers and Bad Lieutenant were, for different reasons, extremely tough for me to sit through.) And you know what? I feel superior when someone walks out of a movie, or clicks past it on TV. Yes: I'm a snob about the stupid fact that I like them all -- about my having virtually no discernible standards. Is that nuts, or what? But there it is.
- Computers: Oh boy, this is a good one. No, I'm not an operating-system snob. And I don't care what Internet provider you use, or whether you're still on a dial-up modem, or whatever. The snobbery here is a snobbery, well, of purism: "Y'know, my computer never breaks down/my software never misbehaves/I don't have that problem -- ever -- and therefore it must be something you're doing." Yes, I know I'm just whistling past the graveyard; I know my time is coming (even though I've been working with computers for over 25 years and have yet to suffer the sort of catastrophic failure that, apparently, everyone else deals with every 18 months or so) (there, see that? that was an entirely uncalled for parenthetical and snobbish remark).
Which makes your own snobbery, of course, one of the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
* On the other hand, once I start a book I almost always finish it. One exception, and don't try to talk me out of it, was The Prince of Tides. I couldn't -- can't -- believe so many people whose opinions I respect were so ga-ga over it. I got about 15-20 pages into it, thinking the whole time, JEE-zus, what a blowhard this guy is...! Which, needless to say, put me off cracking open any of Mr. Conroy's other works.
