Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll starts the new year off with a bang in JENNIFER RUBIN: ARROGANT SNOB FOR THE AGES. She writes:

Remember when the Khmer Rouge under mass murderer Pol Pot killed everyone in Cambodia with glasses or – if they were lucky – just exiled them from the city to be worked to death on farms? Yeah, that was awesome. People with glasses might have been educated and that was, you know, “elitist” and bad. God forbid, they were just normal yokels with poor vision, but oh well, when making those tasty Commie Omelets, you gotta break a few eggs. By incomplete records, around 2-3 million broken eggs…in Cambodia alone.

Now we see Twitter Queen, Fake Republican and Miserable, Haggard Old Berkeley grad and Trump Hater Jennifer Rubin chiming in on somebody else’s Tweet that the Trump Party will soon be a “rump party” of Southern crackers who don’t talk goodly like the elite does. And Jenny adds: “and non-college educated.” Jenny, you ignorant hack, you say that like it’s a BAD thing. Sort of a reverse image of Pol Pot, not yet as dangerous, but plenty bigoted — this time out, the working stiffs are anathema instead of the educated. Am I saying Jennifer Rubin is a mass murderer? Of course not. Grow up. But a snotty snob for sure.

Okay, just for the record, almost every Trump supporter that I know PERSONALLY, has not just a college degree, but advanced and multiple degrees, so it’s a lie on the face of it, but the outrageous arrogance that would make Rubin say such a thing is what I find most disturbing. It’s of a piece with our dear friends in the unbiased, neutral media saying we are “smelly” Walmart shoppers with bad teeth.

How hard is it to be a college graduate anyway? I just remembered that even I went to college – three of them in fact over an 18-year period – and eventually earned a Speech Communication Degree from a fourth-rate diploma factory. That citadel of scholarship has morphed in the last couple of decades into a motley morass of microaggression sleuths ferreting out Deplorable “ists” hither and yon. The last time I darkened its doorstep, there were actually little signs on the desks in Administration that said, “This is a violence-free workplace.” I burst out laughing. “Well, I guess that distinguishes it from all the other workplaces that welcome and encourage violence,” I said to my tour guide who did not quite know what to say. Especially since I was at that time a member of the Board of Trustees, and generous donor. In Academia, disagreement IS “violence.” Sad. So sad.

But back to Sweet Jenny. Can you dear readers even THINK of anything more Untouchable than a non college-educated person? Icky-poo! Let me list a couple college-free people it has been my honor to know whose native intelligence – not even to mention USEFULNESS – has got to be greater than Jenny’s by several orders of magnitude. Unlike Cornpop, Warren’s Cherokee MeeMaw or Corey Booker’s pseudonymous friend, these are real people:

Elaine. She is the widow of my father’s lifelong friend in Bryant, South Dakota. A very prosperous farm woman, she sewed all her own clothes, even making her own patterns. She is a country cook whose food would make hipster chefs weep with envy, bakes elaborate wedding cakes as a sideline business, tended a half-acre vegetable garden well into her 80s, makes quilts, knits, crochets, and can do all manner of needlework. Naturally, she canned all her own garden produce. There is no farm task which she couldn’t do alongside her late husband. Alas, no college degree and, it goes without saying, a Trump Republican.

Enrique: He may or may not be a Trump supporter, but it really doesn’t matter because he is a Jehovah’s Witness who does not vote. The fact that he is also an illegal would normally be no barrier to his voting because he now lives in California. I just want to honor him as one of the smartest non college-educated people I have ever met, and someone with whom I would rather spend all day any day than one minute with Jennifer Rubin.

The fourth of 10 children born to a single mother in Southern Mexico, Enrique only got to go to school to about the 5th grade, and then sporadically. He was needed to bring in money to the desperately poor family. From the time he was a toddler he shined shoes, picked up cans, and did any odd job that anyone would give him a peso for. Sometimes his mother would send him on kind of a Trick-or-Treat journey to the neighbors to beg for “a couple of tortillas just for the younger kids.” The older ones went hungry.

By middle school age, he apprenticed himself to a variety of older workingmen to learn car mechanics, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, and any other skill anyone would teach him. After he came to the U.S., he learned professional window-washing and, of course, landscaping. He loved all plants and sang to them or whistled while he worked. It was a point of pride to him that he never went to the fields, though he had nothing but respect for those who did. He was married, with a severely mentally challenged daughter, but you would think he was the happiest man in the world. He worked for me for five years. It was uplifting just to be around him and I cried for days when he moved.

Lest the list go on indefinitely, let me just assure Ms. Snotty Pants that almost everything she eats, everything that gets delivered by semis from one place to another and Amazon, every item of clothing she wears, every drop of fuel she pumps, every piece of ore from the ground, the assembly of every car she drives (or is driven in), the construction of her home(s) and the printing of every book she has ever read, was PROBABLY provided by hard-working people who never went to college. Maybe some of them did and good for them! Even family farming has gotten complicated enough that a college education is helpful, if not absolutely necessary.

At least in the olden days, if you majored in Agriculture, you would probably be studying subjects critical to, uh, Farm Stuff, and not a lot of postmodern deconstruction of English Literature. (Hint: If you DO have to take such a course, just babble on tediously about sexism, imperialism, and white and male supremacy until everything uplifting, creative, universal and original is leached out of the work of art, and you’ll be fine…) I’m pretty sure that Mining and Mineral Extraction requires a big team of people with advanced knowledge in Sciencey things like Geology and various forms of Engineering that I know nothing about. But there is still going to be an army of roughnecks and big guys doing dirty jobs to make the thing work.

See, Jen, there’s a REASON that talking heads on television were never asked to become part of an industrial union. It’s because no one would miss them if they went on strike. Give it a whirl and see how long it takes for the Great Unwashed Without College to agree to give up Trump if only you will, pretty please, come back and brighten their lives. Finally, is it just me, or do these deranged Trump Haters actually age faster than normal? I guess being that miserable, furious, and ungrateful takes its toll on both mind and body.

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