What'd I Tell You, Barack?

I can appreciate the thought, but buddy, this ain't gonna help.

Yes, you did grow up less privileged than your counterparts. Hell, you're the only one of them who hasn't been a Republican at some point.

But that isn't why they're calling you "elitist". It has nothing to do with privilege, which the media and Washington both fall over themselves to adore.

It has to do with the fact that you're a tall, well dressed, well groomed, good looking, slender man who speaks well. That doesn't signal "privileged" in these people's minds. It signals something else.

They're calling you queer, Barack. They're calling you gay, Barack. They're calling you a fag, Barack. When Brooks goes on and on about "bobo"? Gay. When O'Reilly is railing against your comments? Gay. When Candy Crowley is saying "the people think he's an elitist?" Gay.

Gay, gay, gay.

But they know they can't get away with that overtly, so they're using proxy terms like "elitist", which they've invested in all this effete baggage over the years, and which now have a dual meaning.

That dual meaning makes it wonderfully flexible, too. They can use terms that actually signal elitism, and make them serve a dual purpose. Intellectual elites are more likely to be secular than the common man, so secularity is tied to a certain brand of elitism. So if you're secular? Gay. Elites go to Ivy League schools, though generally because of their families, an advantage you didn't have. So if you went to a Ivy League school? Gay. And so on.

(Of course, Republicans of various stripes are definitely elitists, and they seem to be turning up in hot tubs and airport washrooms on a regular basis getting their "not-hetero" on. But they're Republicans, so obviously they aren't gay, because not-gay people vote for them!)

So, yeah, they can get away with it. It helps that the Dems are so relatively gay-friendly, but it has more to do with their weak and womanish views towards helping the less fortunate and saving the environment and whatnot. REAL men (read: hetero) would never stand for it. Let 'em die in a gutter whilst guzzling domestic beer and eating raw meat, that's what real men do!

Points for effort. And were this a serious question of elitism, it might even help. But talking about being underprivileged won't help you, because it's not about privilege. It's about exploiting the carefully-crafted confusion in American society between signifiers of status and signifiers of homosexuality in order to turn your real best strength (your charisma) into a weakness (lol ur a fag). Nothing more.

It's, well, perverted, but it's the truth.