Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:35 PM by Gene

Why does this irritate me?

Back in the old days, you used to have a feel for the common people, a sense that the “popular” in “popular culture” meant of and for the people, not, as it does in high school, “cool and obnoxious.” But now it seems you prefer to mock or condescend to regular folks, or else just render them invisible in fantasies of universal ease, affluence and entitlement. That bubble has burst, and it’s high time you emerged from yours.

Perhaps because I saw this first:

Belatedly, the Globe has been trying to present as its public face the salt-of-the-earth types in the backshop, guys who live in towns like Weymouth and went to work at the paper out of high school.

These are the same blue-collar Massachusetts natives that the bow-tied bumkissers upstairs alternately disdain or despise as mean-spirited bigots who can’t be trusted to vote the “right way.”

And this is slightly irritating because Howie, with his RADIO salary, is much closer to the bow-tied bumkissers. It has been quite a while since BIGMEDIA had a knack for pleasing its customers. We see it in newspapers going out of business; we see it in effete ad-blurbists apologizing for their effetery and their blurbs; we see it in the well-timed populism of bigmouth millionaires.