Jim George, Proud Deplorable (and rube)

A letter to the editor appeared in our paper, The Baton Rouge Advocate, this morning which contained the above words describing all of us “deplorables” down here in South Flyover Country (and from sea to shining sea!)and it just called so loudly for an answer I simply could not resist answering, as it were, “the call of the loon”. The letter was entitled “Electoral College bad way to pick President”, and the writer listed several reasons in support of his position in that regard, including the following:

“Third, the historical excuses for the Electoral College have become anachronistic. Mass media and the constitution have seen to that. Now that information is so plentiful and so readily available to everyone, there is absolutely no need to rely on educated and informed surrogates to do the thinking for the rubes in the hinterland. Slaves were freed in by the Emancipation Proclamation and made full citizens by the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments, thus obviating any need to afford the additional advantage previously given to southern states by the Electoral College system.”(Emphasis mine)

My response, just submitted to The Advocate for their consideration of an alternate and hopefully reasonable viewpoint, is as follows, and is submitted for your perusal and comment, if any:

“In a letter which appeared in the November 21, 2016, issue, the writer, perhaps quite inadvertently, revealed, in a single phrase, the mindset which delivered the Trump Presidency to America, including those like the writer who would have preferred to be celebrating President Hillary Rodham Clinton now. In his discussion of the reasons supporting his position that, to quote the title, the “Electoral College [is a] bad way to pick [P]resident”, he states, apparently referring to the Electors, that “there is absolutely no need to rely on educated and informed surrogates to do the thinking for the rubes in the hinterland” which truly tells the entire story of why we now have a President-Elect Trump and a Vice-President Elect Pence. As a proud member of that reviled “basket of deplorables” so sneeringly condescended to by the Democrat nominee before her Manhattan audience of elite grandees, in which she called me, and those who joined me in that hated “basket” that day, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and, as if that were not enough, “you name it” just for good measure! The writer, and those similarly inclined, may not wish to admit it, but “deplorables” like me, or, shall we say, “rubes” in our “hinterlands”, are quite simply sick of being the subject of what appeared to many of us to be a continuing wave of sneer and snark and condescension, so we elected the person we thought, in good faith, would Make America Great Again, for–to answer the insulting cast of Hamilton recently in their “lecture” to the future Vice-President of the United States–, “all of us.” “

“As I noted the occupation of the writer was indicated to be “librarian”, I would suggest he is well situated to take advantage of the large body of scholarly research on the origins of, and the reasons for, the Electoral College, one more brilliant gift of the greatest group of geniuses ever gathered in history, our Founding (if I may be pardoned for this bit of non-PC language) Fathers. Should he take advantage of all that research, he will undoubtedly learn, in addition to the fact that we are not, in fact, a democracy, but a Democratic Republic, that were it not for the Electoral College, every Presidential election would be decided by four states, 3 very blue and 1 very red, in which event we “rubes in the hinterland” would, for all intents and purposes, lose the franchise. Surely, the writer and those of like mind would not wish that, even for those they hold in such obvious contempt that they refer to us as “rubes”, would they? God Bless America, and thank God for the Founding Fathers!”

There was a great piece recently in American Thinker entitled “Is Hypocrisy a Character Trait of the Left?” and the answer was, not exactly surprisingly, a resounding yes. However, it definitely would appear that one character trait which seems to be missing among the left, in addition to even the slightest scintilla of a sense of humor, is a sense of irony leading to a near-total inability to see that what happened to their candidate was, in large part, this precise kind of condescension and snark.