An ingenious reversal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1287053,00.html
Criticism of manufactured culture is the opposite of elitist
Paul Taylor
Friday August 20, 2004
The Guardian
Those for whom "old" Labour values represent more than just nostalgia
have resigned themselves to the chatterati's misrepresentations of
socialism. But they reached a new low in these pages when Tristram
Hunt accused Robert Noonan, the author of The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists, a seminal description of working-class consciousness,
of being a closet elitist. Noonan, an impoverished Irish immigrant
painter, belonged to an "implicitly middle-class elite". As if that
wasn't enough, Martin Kettle then implicated Noonan's socialism with
the death of millions.
In an ingenious semantic reversal, the term elitist is now applied to
those, like Noonan, who dispute a culture manufactured above the heads
of the people. You are now an elitist if you believe all should have
the opportunity to access the best culture, not just the watered-down
version. The new elitists believe that a testing education rather than
an education system built upon tests gives people more chance of
understanding why they're at the bottom of the heap. Under the guise
of anti-elitism, those who have other options encourage those who
don't to be satisfied with their lot.
Paul Taylor
http://news.google.com/news?q=%20%22Paul%20Taylor%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Paul+Taylor%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&tab=nw&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Paul+Taylor%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&output=search&cat=gwd/Top
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_epq=Paul%20Taylor&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
Martin Kettle
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0402170349.20245649%40posting.google.com
http://snipurl.com/82n3
http://snipurl.com/82n1
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