Every year I fantasize about going on the stupid National Review cruise (incognito, of course). This year, it must have been extra delicious. It certainly sounds like it was a blast. I wonder if I would come to feel sympathy for the cruisers or if my anger would just gradually rise to the point that I wanted to torpedo the ship.
As a white Protestant man with three Mayflower ancestors who grew up in an elite Ivy League town as the son of an advertising agency executive, I could have considered this country as somehow belonging more to me than to everyone else. I have known plenty of elitist bastards of the type that people the National Review’s stupid cruise. I do not like them, even if most of them are very polite and well-meaning.
There is nothing more depressing than a 60-something Old Money WASP who watches Fox News and actually believes what they’re seeing. It’s hard to swallow condescension when it comes from someone who is both infinitely more rich and more stupid than you are.
These folks can’t function in a world where a black man runs the country instead of serving them drinks. And they are so ruined over it that they can’t even register the gargantuan improvement in how the country is being run now that a black man is in charge when compared to the Blue-Blooded WASP who preceded him.
Reality isn’t supposed to be this way:
At other times, things got a little too old-fashioned for comfort. I met a man near the railing who was there as a caregiver for a 70-year-old National Review cruiser from Palm Desert, California. He was gay and seemingly liberal and had come on the cruise only to push his boss around in a wheelchair. As he smoked a cigarette, he recounted a conversation the two had about the ship’s largely Indonesian and Filipino staff.
BOSS: You notice none of the workers are white.
CAREGIVER: Except the managers upstairs.
BOSS: Well, that’s the way it should be.
Or, as Jonah Goldberg explains, somewhat more diplomatically:
“This is a more downbeat bunch this year,” he said. “We lost in 2008, but it was almost boisterous and fun. This, a little less so. People were dyspeptic.
“Their conception of what the country is about, they really were sure the country would reject Barack Obama,” he continued. “I do think it hits them hard. The fear I have, why this election stung, I think, Obama has successfully de-ratified some of the Reagan revolution in a way that Clinton never could and didn’t even try to. That’s what freaks people out, that feeling in their gut, either Obama has changed the country, or the country has sufficiently changed that they don’t have a problem with Obama. That’s what eats at people.”
Yeah, the guy saved the economy and the stock market doubled, but he’s black and that eats at these people. Better to lose half your fortune than to double it, cuz he’s black.
I know how to get along with these folks. You talk about sports and the weather. The worst part about them is that their evil is so banal.
Maybe someone will pay me to cruise with them next year.
