IPFS Menckens Ghost

More About: Politics: Democratic Campaigns

Bernistas, Baristas and Bolsheviks without Rakes and Ambition

That strange question came to mind after spending last weekend in the heart of Bernie territory in southern Arizona.  A two-hour drive from my home in Phoenix, that would be leftist Tucson, and specifically, the left-wing neighborhoods surrounding the University of Arizona. 

In walking the hoods, I saw a lot of Bernie campaign signs in front yards.  Curiously, almost all of the signs were in unkempt yards and in front of poorly maintained homes.  The yards and homes were eyesores, the worst looking yards and homes in the middle-class and lower-middle-class hoods.

What explains this?

On further reflection, the explanation is not that the Bernistas can't afford rakes.  After all, they had cars in their driveways—not luxury cars and not well-maintained cars, but cars nonetheless (with Bernie bumper stickers).  If they can afford a car, they can certainly afford a rake.

Maybe it's a matter of skill.  Perhaps Bernistas own rakes but don't know how to use them.  If so, it would appear that they also don't know how to use a garden hose to water dying plants or how to bend over to pick weeds. 

My poor immigrant grandparents somehow knew how to do these chores.  They and other Italian immigrants kept their very modest homes in the Italian section of St. Louis in pristine condition.  To this day, the Italian hood is considered a very desirable place to live and is a tourist attraction.

Perhaps the explanation is that the Bernistas think it is too bourgeois to do such chores—too beneath their intellectualism and too counter to their Marxist dialectic.  After all, their patron saint Karl rebelled against his bourgeois upbringing, and there is no history of him ever raking a yard or painting a house.

There is another explanation, but I dread saying it, because it would be judgmental, which is a  mortal sin in the Church of Political Correctness, except when left wingers are judgmental about anyone to their right.

Oh, well, I can always go to confession and say a couple of rosaries in penance.

Here goes:  Maybe Bernistas aren't industrious and ambitious.

There, I've said it.

The evidence sure points that way.   Many of the older Bernistas look like ageing Flower Children, the kind who gravitated to places like Tucson years ago to enjoy life in the slow lane—to work part time as bartenders and waiters, smoke a little weed, and have just enough money to own the hippie status symbol of a VW Bus. 

Many others look like the modern version of Flower Children.  They are the tattooed and ringed and stapled hipsters who goofed off in their youth or majored in feminist studies in college and now work as baristas or in seedy hookah shops in the hipster part of Tucson.  Similar Bernistas can be found in Berkeley, Austin, Madison, and every square foot of Vermont.

Tucson is a perfect place for Bernistas and their soft Bolshevism, because the local economy is mostly dependent on government money—on the University of Arizona's main campus and its satellite medical school, on the public school complex, on a healthcare complex that relies on Medicare and Medicaid moolah, on retirees and winter residents who rely on Social Security, and on two sources of revenue that are anathema to the Bernistas:   Davis Monthan Air Force Base and defense contractor Raytheon.

Due to a longstanding aversion to capitalism, industry, growth, and freeways, Tucson streets and parks are in disrepair, traffic is excruciatingly slow, the homeless and aimless abound, and homes in the center city have security bars on doors and windows but no rakes in sight.  Alarmingly, the Tucson Police Department recently announced it was going to lay off 20% of the police force due to a lack of money.

Phoenix is the opposite.  It is dynamic, diversified, modern, clean, and growing.  Bernistas, as well as Tucsonians in general, hate it.

Tucson is reminiscent of life in East Germany, or specifically, life in East German public housing, where the tragedy of the commons prevailed.   Marxism had driven out pride of ownership and industriousness.  Lobbies, elevators and hallways were seedy, and no one seemed to own a rake or broom, and even if they did, they wouldn't have had an incentive to use them.

In a fit of class-consciousness, a lot of "B" words are floating around in my head:  Bernistas, baristas, Bolsheviks, and bourgeoisie. 

Judging by what I saw in Tucson, I'd rather live among the bourgeoisie than the others.  At least they have rakes and ambition.