HEY HEEVAHAVA! "He's uppity" -- for the 10,000th time
Bartender! A double-shot and more beer! What'sh it take to get served here?!
The citizens of Pennsyltucky remain endlessly fascinating to those who didn't grow up there.
In a piece which ran in The Guardian, a big UK newspaper, an Obama canvasser explains the attitudes of middle-aged white people in Erie. One gets the usual script that, logically, this demographic should be running away from John McCain and the GOP with its hair on fire. And that's certainly the truth.
A few of the usual heevahavas are trotted out. Obama -- sounds like Osama -- mutters one. Another thinks Barack Obama too eloquent. He's "uppity" -- an unimaginative script stupidly trying to make the point that speaking well is a bad thing. In this man's crabbed world, being smart is a handicap.
The writer describes this as a type of soft racism, a bigotry which can be erased by knocking on doors until those answering dimly associate Barack Obama with a white face.
There may be something to it. However, in DD's experience, "uppity" goes way back. It was constantly used in Pine Grove, Schuylkill County, to put down people who achieved intellectually -- or did well in something as small as high school. It was, more precisely, an expression of mean envy, one in which the jealous took a cheap shot at someone who was talented and a hard worker.
When DD sees it at this late juncture, it's the outburst of the heevahava -- the opinion of a dolt -- represented as a thing to be taken way too seriously.
Dolt is not a synonym for 'average person.' The dolt is, more often, just a dolt, as likely to be found face down and mumbling in a bar on election day as at the voting booth. If Barack Obama's campaign had seriously believed these potential voters were an insurmountable obstacle in Pennsylvania, polls wouldn't have him up now by double digits.
Screw you, heevahava, and have one for me when you're attacking that case on election day.
See here.
Bartender! A double-shot and more beer! What'sh it take to get served here?!
The citizens of Pennsyltucky remain endlessly fascinating to those who didn't grow up there.
In a piece which ran in The Guardian, a big UK newspaper, an Obama canvasser explains the attitudes of middle-aged white people in Erie. One gets the usual script that, logically, this demographic should be running away from John McCain and the GOP with its hair on fire. And that's certainly the truth.
A few of the usual heevahavas are trotted out. Obama -- sounds like Osama -- mutters one. Another thinks Barack Obama too eloquent. He's "uppity" -- an unimaginative script stupidly trying to make the point that speaking well is a bad thing. In this man's crabbed world, being smart is a handicap.
The writer describes this as a type of soft racism, a bigotry which can be erased by knocking on doors until those answering dimly associate Barack Obama with a white face.
There may be something to it. However, in DD's experience, "uppity" goes way back. It was constantly used in Pine Grove, Schuylkill County, to put down people who achieved intellectually -- or did well in something as small as high school. It was, more precisely, an expression of mean envy, one in which the jealous took a cheap shot at someone who was talented and a hard worker.
When DD sees it at this late juncture, it's the outburst of the heevahava -- the opinion of a dolt -- represented as a thing to be taken way too seriously.
Dolt is not a synonym for 'average person.' The dolt is, more often, just a dolt, as likely to be found face down and mumbling in a bar on election day as at the voting booth. If Barack Obama's campaign had seriously believed these potential voters were an insurmountable obstacle in Pennsylvania, polls wouldn't have him up now by double digits.
Screw you, heevahava, and have one for me when you're attacking that case on election day.
See here.
posted by George Smith at 11:53 PM
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