For many years, I’ve felt the class war in America is not really between rich and poor, white and non-white, native vs. foreign born, or various religious factions. It’s the townies vs. the gownies.
“Townies” are people whose jobs and hobbies can be described with simple words that everyone understands: plumbers who hunt, nurses who garden, shopkeepers who make furniture.
“Gownies” are educated in abstruse skills from financial management, to the law, to medical research, to political consulting. Media personalities, a key cohort of gownies, are sometimes described as “symbol manipulators.” Gownies might do stuff on their day off that an ordinary adult can pronounce — say, tennis or golf — but their lifestyles are complex and mysterious to outsiders. They go to restaurants with foreign names, and order overpriced concoctions that people like me cannot pronounce.
Just so you know, I’m a townie. For over 30 years as a career farmer, I never got all the dirt out from underneath my fingernails. Gownies who can’t find the dipstick in their foreign cars look down their noses on me.
Plenty of townies are well-read and versatile, but tend not to be overly impressed by credentials. “What can you do?” is a more important question than, “Where did you go to school?”
The current President (as of 2017)is a townie. One reason for the bottomless hatred by the preppies at CNN and by limousine liberals, is for Trump’s apostasy. He did receive a degree from an Ivy League school (Wharton) but he’s still a tough kid from Queens who grew up in the construction business. You want some concrete poured on schedule? Call The Donald.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden are all gownies. Hence the pathetic photo ops of them pretending to be reg’lar folks, in contrast to their heartfelt contempt for bitter clingers, deplorables, and most recently, the dregs of society. If any one of these three slides into a ditch on a snowy road, they have to call a townie to pull them out, but they can only hide their disdain long enough to get the car running again.
Postscript by Clare Spark: For a historical view of the antagonism between town and gown see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown. It has a photo of an Australian social democratic attempt to merge town and gown. The picture on this guest blog is of a Yale University student protest.
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