Djelloul Marbrook

Of all the trumped-up issues that beset this presidential campaign elitism is the most slippery. Putting aside suspicion that it may disguise racism when it comes to Barack Obama, the word smells as a pejorative because its users are elitists.

Does it make sense for the quintessential power elitist Hillary Clinton to get away with painting a Chicago community activist as an elitist? No, but the press has swallowed the ploy.

The press is an elite, the politicians are an elite, doctors are an elite, poets are an elite, bankers, Wall Street manipulators, our military leadership, our corporados—all elitists. How preposterous then that the word should be pinned on Senator Obama, unless it’s code for something else, the way the Southern Strategy has always been code for racism.

Why is the word derogatory when we use it to describe Senator Obama’s bad bowling or his plea to be left alone to eat his waffles when it is laudatory when applied to the SEALs? It is correct to use this word in both instances. What is troubling about smearing Senator Obama with the word is that it freights the word with bias.

Our lives are controlled by a hotchpot of elites. For one elite to slime another by the name is a shabby trick.

Words are, in the best of circumstances, two-edged swords, like statistics. That is why the evolution of humankind depends on heightened use of our other senses, our antennae. Evolution depends on our refusing to deny the testimony of senses in order to cling to comfortable lies.             —DM