perfidy

Andrew Sullivan's reader email of the day:

"Maybe I am just getting older and don't get it or it could be the fact that I grew up in a small Midwestern burg and understand how hopeless my friends and family are who stayed there. Either way these people are jerk-offs. Two things came to mind when I read this. The first is these people would get their asses kicked if they threw a half-full can of beer at someone at a party. Not just because of the action, but because it is a waste of beer. Secondly, these "hipsters" would not last five minutes in any of the number of small towns in this country where this kind of culture really thrives. Any real goat roper who grew up drinking Pabst will tell you it is skunk beer and small town people know this. The only way to make it better is to add salt to it, I mean how wrong is that? My point is rural Americans don't need condescending pricks in New York to tell them they are cool. We already knew it and embraced it years ago."

Fucking A! That whole dipshit trucker-hat and Midwest chic thing (which, by the way, has been covered in the Times and is therefore officially over) really pissed this Ohio boy off. Whenever I see an "ironic" trucker hat around town, my arm automatically does this sort of Dr. Strangelove jerk, and I must physically restrain myself from knocking the ironic hat off the dimwit's head in a decidedly un-ironic, looking-to-kick-ass fashion.

The one silver lining is that, as of a couple years ago, one could step into Welcome To The Johnsons on the Lower East Side and get hosed on PBR for under $20. The same could also be said of Joe's Bar on E. 6th, but Joe's doesn't have tabletop Ms. Pac Man, and the bathroom door doesn't actually close.

Also, we prefer the term "briar hopper."
Original post is here, excerpted:

I went to my first white-trash theme party three years ago. I felt cool because John Bartlett was throwing it. We had corn-dogs and twinkies and malt liquor and wore half-mesh ball-caps. Maybe the "bear" trend is also a throw-back to '70s white trash culture. Ditto South Park Republicans, where the politics of the Red Zone has become the politics of the Blue-Red Set. Is all this hopelessly condescending? Maybe. But part of the refreshing nature of these trends is exactly their unconcern with whether they're forms of condescension or not, or even whether they're ironic or not. They're just cool and insensitive. It took only one generation of political correctness to fuse the two. As Rolling Stone editor, Joe Levy, puts it, "If you have a bohemian neighborhood full of people drinking bad beer and wearing ugly T-shirts and trucker hats and dressing the exact same way as Justin Timberlake, it's real and it's ironic, and it's cool and it's uncool at the same time." Exactly.