I'm educated, liberal, urban, mobile, and damn proud of it!

In a disappointing bit of tired conventional wisdom hackery, today's New York Times has an Op-Ed extolling the down-home virtues of contemporary country music. Surprisingly, this pointlessly shallow cultural exploration is not from David Brooks, but rather some guy named Kurt Campbell.

The piece is basically a rehash of the standard, tired old meme that Democrats/liberals/blue-staters are a bunch of silly snobs who are out of touch with the 'real' Americans and their more authentic culture.

Among other gems is this stunner:

"Country music – not jazz, hip hop or blues – is the most authentic and popular form of music in America today."

Popular maybe, but Authentic? Can he possibly be talking about the same contemporary country music that I hear on the radio - the one that is nothing but bubble gum diva pop very thinly and poorly disguised with a transparent veneer of twangy 'tude?

This ridiculousness got me thinking about this whole meme of 'authenticity.' I am sick and tired of the stupid yet widely accepted notion that only people with certain (often working class) values and lifestyles are 'real,' while the rest of us who live differently are silly, fake, ungrounded, and flighty.

If you stop to think about it, this meme is everywhere, and accepted in all quarters. It is perfectly acceptable in discourse at all levels, from political analysis to talk show banter to academic discourse, to throw around stereotypes of educated, urban, mobile people as "Volvo-driving, brie-cheese-eating elitists" as in the Op-Ed in question, or some other nonsense, whereas one cannot do such brazen attacks on other lifestyles. Imagine a columnist or guest on a political talk show lumping a demographic as 'Those inbred NASCAR-watching yokels in the country' or 'Those fake thugs and chickenheads in the ghetto.' It would never happen, but they can chuckle all they want about 'latte swillers.'

Just yesterday in the Times, David Brooks himself wrote, in an attempt to criticize the 'indie rock' genre of music:

"indie rock’s real wall is social; it’s the genre for the liberal-arts-college upper-middle class."

So what? Implicit here is the automatic assumption that because something is 'the genre for the liberal-arts-college upper-middle class' it is by definition of little value. I call BS on that - even if Brooks were right in his analysis (which he is of course not) the 'liberal-arts-college upper-middle class' is a viable sub-culture just as deserving of their forms of expression as anyone else.

In an example of how this pervades popular mass culture, how many cop movies do we have to see where a goofy middle class white guy gets paired with a cool black guy who over the course of the movie teaches him how to 'keep it real'? (for a funny send-up of this tired cinematic formula, look here)
Furthermore, it is almost taken as a given in our popular culture that educated people who move around a lot need to 'get off their high horse' and be taught valuable life lessons by the down home folks back home. Well, you know what, in my 29 years I've been all over the place and done and learned a hell of a lot, and they have at least as much to learn from me as I do from them.

This authenticity meme is not just incorrect, it is harmful and insulting. I am pretty sure it must originate from the bowels of the right wing, where they seek to divide and conquer the natural alliance of those that might oppose them. And just to demonstrate the complete logical bankruptcy of the argument, this notion is often promulgated by 'regular guy millionaires' like Chris Matthews, Rush Limbaugh, Tim Russert, and, of course, the op-ed writers of the Times.

So I'm going to say it right here: I'm educated, I'm urban, I'm liberal, I've moved all around the country, and I'm damn real! I am never going to apologize for my lifestyle or sub-culture. In my life, I have forged amazing and profound friendships and relationships. I've had some great triumphs and some soul crushing disappointments. I've put in some amount of effort to go to a good college and then get a PhD. I've done everything I can to be informed, knowledgeable, well rounded, and to lead my life in a way consistent with my values, which are solid but are open to being shaped by my ongoing experiences. I've been in love and been lonely and been content and been fretful. I've stood on top of mountains, slept under stars, and buried loved ones. I've worked hard at times, I've played hard at times, and I've taken it easy at times. I have been proud of things I have done and regretful of things I've done. I've had to compromise with myself and others to get along in this world. In short, I've done everything 'authentic' that humans do in their lives, and the cultural outlets that I choose resonate with my experience, values, and interests. This is as real and authentic as it gets, and it doesn't, in my case, involve NASCAR, country music, R&B, marrying my high school sweetheart, or anything else that is, in the eyes of this meme, supposedly more real than what I've done.