Pigs, lipstick, toasters, and elitists

In a world marred by incessant conflict, poverty, disease, and now financial meltdown we have all been praying for some comic relief. Yesterday, the gods of humour, with their infinite wisdom and boundless mercy, propitiated.

Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, wife of British banking mogul Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild, prominent support of Hillary Clinton and member of the DNC, endorsed John McCain. Following McCain’s slogan almost to the letter she said it was time “to put country ahead of party”. Though worth an absolute fortune, de Rothschild insisted that she’s simply a middle class girl from New Jersey. Yeah, and Barack Obama’s an elitist.

Well, apparently he is. That was essentially the logic of de Rothschild’s endorsement. Straining the limits of credulity, de Rothschild said, “I don’t like him, I feel like he’s an elitist.” It was clearly beyond a middle class New Jersey girl, who, as chance would have it, happens to be worth well over $100M, to support an arrogant elitist, who, as chance would have it, was raised by a single mother, of modest means, and by grandparents, of even humbler origins, and who put himself through college before turning down top dollar jobs to work in South Chicago.

As one blogger put it, “Irony truly is dead.” But we’re all missing the point. De Rothschild put it best when she said “to be privileged is not elitist.”

“An elitist is someone whose state of mind is that they’re better than the rest of us,” she said.

Thankfully, there are such people around to square these pressing matters for us.

So Barack Obama, the elitist, has lost the stamp of approval of the House of the Rothschilds. It remains to be seen how the de facto endorsement of Britain’s premier financial family will help John McCain in the wake of “meltdown Monday”. It’s unlikely to seriously affect Obama’s sleep, even though de Rothschild has vowed to campaign for McCain between now and November 4.

The McCain camp has yet to confirm where the campaigning will take place. But de Rothschild, who divides her time between New York City and a British country estate, may have a couple of suggestions. Perhaps it was learning that McCain had seven homes that swung it for the forsaken Clintonite. Now that she is the source of ridicule from just about everybody with one home or less, she conjured the image of great anti-elitists before her. “Ronald Reagan might have said it right,” she contended, “the Democratic Party left me, I didn’t leave the Democratic Party.”

Whether this is racism, classism, or sheer patriotism, it simply beggars belief. However, there is nothing quite as odd, and strangely satisfying, as watching one of the planet’s privileged few paint his/herself with the brush of the commoner, or better yet the victim.

With that in mind, one eagerly awaits these campaigning events.

“In your places or mine John?”