Thirty years ago, nobody knew what Cloud and Dirt people were, and you would have been thought you odd if you used the phrase: American ruling class. Now, it’s used all the time and nobody bats an eye. From Zman at thezman.com, via theburningplatform:
Thirty years ago, most Americans felt they could, to some degree, relate to the people who ruled over them. The politicians did not tool around in armored vehicles or have armed men in mirrored sunglasses guarding them. The so-called “public servants” were not highly compensated, even if they did not work very hard. The members of the commentariat were few in number and they worked hard to present themselves as normal people. There was a gap, for sure, but it did not feel like a huge gap.
A lot has changed and today it feels to most people like we have been colonized by pod people from another planet. They sort of look like us and make familiar noises, but they are not us. They are alien. Every day they say things that suggest they are just visiting our planet. President Obama makes the sort of “gaffes” a person makes when they have been trained to sound like a person, but maybe did not pay strict attention in human class. Hillary Clinton often sounds like a stroke victim learning to talk again.
Today, of course, there is an army of chattering skulls, experts and commenters we see on TV and on-line. Unless you live in one of the guarded combines around Washington or in a swank building in Manhattan, you will never run into these people on the street. They live apart from the rest of us. That’s why they sound like grad students on an anthropology study. They peer out at us and then describe to each other what they think is happening. To them, we’re just talking monkeys in a game park.
The foreignness Americans now feel toward their rulers is rather weak compared to the alienation the rulers feel toward the people. Decades of telling each other scary stories about racist, misogynistic and bigoted Americans has left most of them fearful of normal Americans.The universal response from both the Left and the so-called Right, to the rise of Trump, has been to compete with one another for who can come up with the most vile epithet they can fling at the Trump voter.
Some elements of the ruling class still think they just need to adjust some settings in the enclosures and things will calm down. They write long letters to one another about “connectedness” and how Trump is really just leading a rear guard action of losers and misfits. When that gets boring, it’s back to telling campfire stories about how Hitler has come back from the dead and is organizing the Final Final Solution on twitter. Listen to the mainstream press and you would think the streets are teaming with skinheads, brown shirts and Klansman.
To continue reading: The Unman Manda
