Monday, April 1, 2019

The Role Of City Guy Snobbery In Figuring The Rubes Will Keep Buying Their Stale Wares

Continuing to be harassed over the entirely unimportant issue of Milton Berle's post-sell-by date career I came across a piece written by a NYC native that claimed that Berle's rise and fall was due to him talking fast and inserting Yiddish words in his shtick.  It claimed that when televisions were first marketed only city folk bought them and when the rubes in rural areas started watching they were too stupid to understand Berle and the allegedly foreign sounding Yiddish words weirded them out. The understood idea being that city folk are smarter than country folk.* Since he had more than a decade-long nationally-broadcast radio career before he started in TV, the success of which is what gave him his chance on TV (which the article also talked about), those claims are all too typical New Yorker snob double-speak.  Berle was like so many others in show biz, someone who rose rapidly.  Since he was a joker he sold his jokes.  Nothing gets stale faster than a used joke or a used routine, once Berle had sold his inventory, the public had heard them and moved on to the next guy. Berle in the 1990s (I remember turning him off during that decade in Due South) wasn't much different from Berle in 1950.

I would like to go into the similarities on view in the recent bullshit from Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi who cherish the idea that the American People, at large, are too stupid to understand the clear collusion between the Trump family and campaign and the Putin regime oligarchs who were so successful in manipulating our elections.  That both of those assholes are alleged to be journalists, the profession that has done so much to make more Americans more stupid, they can collectively bite the rest of us. 

Given that the only reason for the corporate entity "the press" to be given freedom was so they would give us the accurate information we would need to prevent tyranny, domestic of foreign, those who are part of the campaign to minimize the danger of Putin or anyone else succeeding in what their servants on the Supreme Court have allowed domestic billionaires and millionaires to do, for them to insult the very people who have been cheated by "the press" they can collectively bite us, again.   I could say a lot more about this.

*  Given who New York City regularly elects to govern it and some of its long time congressional members, their superior intelligence is not a reliable thing, at all.

Update:  Well, offhand, I'm not so impressed with Bloomberg, Giuliani, Koch, Lindsay as mayors or the likes of Peter King as a long-time House member from that most stuck up of cities.   

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