Yesterday The Other Charlotte blogged brilliantly about the alarm of the Beautiful People who staff our cultural elite over the rebellion of the Great Unwashed against the culture purveyed by said elite. (See Hollywood?s Stealth Weapons, March 4.) Imagine–the rubes dare to protest when, say, Janet Jackson bares her breast on a prime-time network television show watched by millions of children! “No one can risk being controversial” anymore, moans Beautiful Person and WaPo columnist Tina Brown, as TOC reported.
That’s right, for as TOC pointed out, the cultural elite backs Democrats, and this election year, it wants a Democrat, specifically John Kerry, to win. But it may already be too late for the liberals.
Only three months into this election year, they’ve already sailed right into what I call the Democrats’ Bermuda Triangle, a three-sided Saragasso Sea consisting of George W. Bush, gay marriage, and The Passion of the Christ, the last of which has already pulled in close to $150 million in a single week from the folks out there in Dogpatch, as columnist Mark Steyn calls them. All three sides converged, for example, on Feb. 15, when Bush, who supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, opened the Daytona 500, in which one car sported a “Passion” advertisement. The fans are the very “NASCAR dads” whom Democrats have made some noises about courting. Good luck, Beautiful People, when you can’t stop sneering at the religious and moral principles that the hicks hold dear and calling them bigots when they don’t agree with you.
Speaking of the cultural elite, Mark Steyn also waxes eloquent about the one endearing–and unabashedly elite–member of Kerry’s entourage, Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry, the gal with the condiment fortune:
“The Kerry campaign is so cynical it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Teresa Heinz is a throaty sensual Continental actress the strategists spotted in some Miramax thing a couple of years back and hired to play the loose-cannon wife who can’t stay on message. ‘Look, fellers, we got the rubes and hicks wrapped up with the “I’m fighting for you against the powerful interests” stuff. But how about we hook in the post-modern crowd by having a sophisticated European standing alongside rolling her eyes at the vapidity of modern vernacular politics? Tina Brown’ll lap it up! We’ll put her in one of those over-the-shoulder Isadora Duncan scarves and every time he drones ‘BRING! IT! ON!’ she can lower her chin into it to look like she’s suppressing her giggles. If she gets it right, the columnists’ll go, “Well, say what you like, but at least there’s one element of the Kerry campaign which isn’t just the usual populist pandering phony-baloney.” Any ideas for the exotic background?’
“‘How about a Portuguese Mozambican ketchup heiress?”
And unlike Mr. Wooden-Face, as Steyn points out, Mrs. Kerry makes only a minimal effort to relate to the lower orders:
“Teresa is supposed to be fluent in five languages, but, alas, populese is not one of them. When it gets to the singalong bits of the Kerry stump speech, when he warns Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Ketchup (whoops) and the other ‘powerful interests’ that own the current Oval Office that ‘We’re coming. You’re going. And don’t ‘ let ‘ the ‘ door ‘ hit ‘ you ‘ on ‘ the ‘ way ‘ out!’, Teresa mouths along randomly with every third or fourth word, with the evident distaste of Maria Callas if you asked her to join in with the Macarena.”
Now John Kerry may be a pseud–but Teresa Kerry is the real thing. Teresa for First Lady!