O'Reilly Among the Snobs
It takes one to know one.
By Michael Kinsley
Do you believe this story?
Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News talk show host, is in the capital for the
Bush inauguration.
He is invited to a fancy dinner party. Reluctantly, he accepts, although
it is not his kind of thing.
According to Newsweek, "O'Reilly said he could feel the socialites
and bigwigs 'measuring' him.
'They're saying, "What's he doing here?" One couple even got up to
leave,' O'Reilly later recalled."
Two people left a Washington dinner party rather than share a table
with a prole like Bill O'Reilly?
Although I wasn't there, I state baldly: It never happened.
That kind of snobbery barely exists in America. (Wednesday's Wall Street
Journal had a front-page
feature on country clubs that exclude Jews, treating the matter correctly
as an odd cultural cul-de-sac,
like a town where everyone plays hopscotch or a Web site devoted to
whistling.) Certainly, traditional
snobbery cannot hope to compete with today's most powerful social ordering
principle: celebrity.
O'Reilly, as he himself has been known to admit, has the most popular
news show on cable.
His book, The O'Reilly Factor was a No. 1 best seller. When
he appears at an "A-list"
(Newsweek's label) social function, nobody wonders, "What's he doing
here?"
Yet O'Reilly, like many other people, clings to the fantasy that he
is a stiff among the swells.
He plays this chord repeatedly in the book, a potpourri of anecdotes
and opinions about life in general
and his in particular. He had a very strange experience as a graduate
student at Harvard's Kennedy School
of Government (which let the likes of Bill O'Reilly through its ivy-covered
gates, he is careful to note,
"in an effort to bring all sorts of people together"). Other Kennedy
School students, he says, insisted on being
called by three names, none of which could be "Vinny, Stevie, or Serge."
Their "clothing was understated but
top quality and their rooms hinted of exotic vacations and sprawling
family property.
Winter Skiing in Grindelwald? No problem."
They tried to be nice, but Bill was nevertheless humiliated, in a Thai
restaurant,
to be "the only one who didn't know how to order my meal in Thai."
I should explain this last one to those who may not have been aware
that Thai is the lingua franca of the
American WASP upper class. The explanation is simple. American Jewish
parents only one or two
generations off the boat often spoke in Yiddish when they didn't want
their children to understand.
Italian-Americans used Italian, and so on. But WASPs only had English.
(They tried Latin, but tended to
forget the declensions after the second martini.) So they adopted Thai,
which they use in front of the servants
and the O'Reillys of the world as well. (At least it sounds like Thai
after the second martini.) When they turn 18,
upper-class children attend a secret Thai language school, disguised
as a ski resort, in Grindelwald.
The notion that the Kennedy School of Government, populated by swells
out of P.G. Wodehouse, reached out
to O'Reilly, a poor orphan out of Dickens, as representing the opposite
pole of the human experience, would be
remarkable enough. But O'Reilly's chapter on "The Class Factor" (Chapter
1, luckily for me) contains some puzzling
counterevidence. "I'm working-class Irish American Bill O'Reilly pretty
far down the social totem pole," he says.
Growing up in the 1960s, he watched his father "exhausting himself
commuting from Levittown" to work as an accountant
for an oil company. Dad "never made more than $35,000" which would
be $100,000 or more in today's money.
Oh, the shame of it! O'Reilly has been downward social climbing. He
is actually, (and I wish I could say this
in Thai, to avoid humiliating him with the children) m-i-d-d-l-e c-l-a-s-s.
He apparently regards that
status with just as much horror as do the toffs of his fevered imagination.
Why fake a humble background?
Partly for business reasons: Joe Sixpack versus the elitists is a good
posture for any talk show host,
especially one on Fox. Partly out of vanity: It makes the climb to
your current perch more impressive.
Partly for political reasons: Under our system, even conservatives
need some plausible theory to
qualify for victim status, from which all blessings flow. But mainly
out of sheer snobbery. And it's the only
kind of snobbery with any real power in America today: reverse snobbery.
Bill O'Reilly pretends
(or maybe sincerely imagines) that he feels the sting of status from
above. But he unintentionally reveals
that he actually fears it more from below. Like most of us.
This is not a terrible thing. Reverse snobbery, unlike the traditional
kind, is a tribute to democracy it's
egalitarianism overshooting the mark. And it is a countervailing social
force against growing economic disparity.
But when you're faking it, if you're not careful, reverse snobbery
can look a lot like the traditional kind.
Bill O'Reilly told Newsweek he would never patronize a Starbucks, because
he prefers a Long Island coffee shop
"where cops and firemen hang out." Guess what, Bill! Cops and firemen
like good coffee too!
And they can afford it. Starbucks is one of the great democratizing
institutions of our time.
You'd know that if you went in there occasionally.
You snob.