Last year -- actually, one year ago yesterday -- George Will wrote a column flaying Barack Obama for his alleged elitist disposition. "What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them," he wrote, calling Obama "a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture."
This was the conservative line at the time, but to hear it coming from Will was more than I could bear.
Today, Will devotes his column to attacking the practice of wearing blue jeans. The column begins:
On any American street, or in any airport or mall, you see the same sad tableau: A 10-year-old boy is walking with his father, whose development was evidently arrested when he was that age, judging by his clothes. Father and son are dressed identically -- running shoes, T-shirts. And jeans, always jeans. If mother is there, she, too, is draped in denim.
The column continues in this vein. Condescension? Criticizing rather than celebrating American culture? Does Will have any self-awareness at all?
--Jonathan Chait