[Peace-discuss] the ruling class

[E. Wayne Johnson]

some thing awakes. It's about time.

"The Ruling Class all go to good schools
where they go to bed on one another,
and then they grow up,
and make all the rules...

Hang the Judges high.
Hang the wise men of the realm."
("Ruling Class", Robyn Hitchcock. 1989.)

****   ****

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an 
educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them 
remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount 
to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with 
secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), 
and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when 
referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a 
badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are 
in, their road up included government channels and government money 
because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American 
life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and 
leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of 
the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence 
whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling 
class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of 
bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not 
oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, 
and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 
19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as 
Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most 
Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling 
class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of 
humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over 
what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. 
The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's 
Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."

"America's Ruling Class and the Perils of R3voJution"
Angelo Codevilla

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print