Life Imitates An Old Sit-Com: Frasier Learns A Lesson About Elitism (And Middle America)

The American media have been talking a lot about elitism of late, particularly after the Republican National Convention. A few in the press see the Democratic Party as being rife with elitism and snobbery, unjustly condescending toward the "fly-over states" of the American heartland. But most journalists, or so it seems to this writer, denounce such characterizations as paranoid and even hypocritical, and yet in such denunciations often actually prove the case against them.

This writer also admits the obvious fact that snobbery can easily take up residence in the homes of conservatives or liberals. However, I believe that most media and academic portrayals of American life are often far more favorable toward liberal and progressive values than they are toward conservative ones. I think any reading of the American press's reaction to Sarah Palin, that apparent rouge-covered rube, proves that elitism abounds in the popular and liberal press and is blisteringly critical of the heartland. That Barack Obama said at a San Francisco gathering that heartlanders cling to God and guns precisely speaks to this point. And irrespective of what Mr. Obama meant, what was heard was snobbery of the highest (or lowest) order.

The other night I watched a rerun of the now syndicated and long-popular TV sit-com, "Frasier." It was one of the show's earliest episodes (actually the third). Readers familiar with the back-story of the show know that the title character, Frasier Crane, is an insufferable pedant infatuated by his own effete persona. Being a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and a recently hired radio talk-show personality in Seattle, where he lives in a trendy apartment with his elderly father (Martin, a retired cop, blue-collar to the core), Frasier can afford to move in society's higher circles where he, and his equally effete and rather frail younger brother (Niles Crane, also a psychiatrist) imbibe in life's most refined pleasures. The show's irony is that the two psychiatrists are wildly insecure and even self-delusional, blundering through life with an assumed transcendence, putting on airs at every turn. Frasier Crane is really Charlie Brown; he's just Charlie Brown with an Ivy League education ... and a great deal of conceit. The entire show is probably Charles Schultz' "Peanuts," just in sit-com format.

The episode I watched was called "Dinner At Eight." It originally aired on Sept. 30, 1993. The story line is rather simple: Frasier and Niles, feeling so estranged from their blue-collar working-class father they wonder if they were fertilized from someone else's loins, decide to take their dad to a tony Seattle restaurant, Le Cigare Volant, both to elevate their dad's sensibilities and improve their relationship. When Frasier's Le Cigare Volant reservation is lost, he and Niles reluctantly follow their dad to Martin's favorite steakhouse, The Timber Mill. To Frasier and Niles, the theme-oriented restaurant is hopelessly tacky, sub-standard, and impossibly "American." They feign enthusiasm but fail to conceal their contempt. After getting their steaks and potatoes (three "Paul Bunyans"), they have this exchange (amid complaints that the courses are coming out of the kitchen too fast and the place too tawdry):

Martin (father): I don't mind you guys being tough on this place, but you could be a little nicer to the waitress.

Frasier: You're right. I'll apologize when she comes with the dessert, which should be any time now.

(Pause for eating/chewing)

Martin: Sometimes there is nothing like a good steak.

Frasier: Well, I wish this was one of those times.

Martin (exasperated): What's wrong?

Frasier: Well, I don't mean to complain but--

Martin: Well, then don't!

(Pause)

Martin: For your information, these steaks come from prized beef raised at... (distracted by Niles, who is picking at his potato) What the hell are you doing?

Niles: Something seems to have fallen into my potato.

Martin (excitedly): Those are bacon bits!

Niles: But I didn't ask for them.

Martin: I ordered all the fixins' ... you got all the fixins'.

Niles: But I don't eat bacon because of the nitrates.

Martin: No problem, they're artificial. They're made out of soy.

Frasier: They really look out for your health here, don't they?

(Both sons suppress giggles.)

Martin (scoldingly): Everybody in this restaurant's enjoying the dinner. Can't you guys do the same?

(Everyone resumes eating.)

Frasier: Niles?

Niles: Hmm, hmm.

Frasier: Is Maris [Niles' wife] organizing the arts council benefit again this year?

Niles: Matter of fact, she is.

Frasier: Where are they holding it?

Niles: Well, they haven't picked a spot yet. Perhaps I should tell them about this place!

(Suppresed laughter; dad glares disgustedly.)

Niles: I would like to be a fly on the wall that night.

Frasier: You wouldn't be the only one!

(Explosive laughter.)

Martin (throwing down his napkin): Alright. That's it. I had enough of you two jackasses. I spent the whole night listening to you makin' cracks about the food, and the help. Well, I got news for you. People like this place. I like this place. And when you insult this restaurant you insult me. ...You know, I used to think you two took after your mother, liking the ballet and all that. But your mother liked a good ball game, too. She would even have a hot-dog once in a while. She may have had fancy taste but she had too much class to ever make me or anybody else feel second-rate. If she saw the way you two behaved tonight she'd be ashamed. I know I am.

(Martin leaves the restaurant.)



(By the way, is Sarah Palin the waitress?)
__________________

"When you insult this restaurant, you insult me." It's a powerful indictment, a piercing rebuke.

I know that all classes insult one another. I know that some of the poorest folk in America think themselves better than the "filthy rich." I know some in the upper classes patronize their lesser neighbors. But what I also know is that the way many on the left insult the leaders of the Republican Party is to identify them as rubes, rednecks, and far worse. George W. Bush is an Ivy League product, but he's not generally identified by the left as elite. Rather, he's depicted as an essential village idiot. Sarah Palin is chided for being a hunter, a hockey mom, a mere Alaskan. The left always, or nearly always, considers the gravest insult to be some identification with heartland values, ideas, sentiments or tastes.

Middle America, that broad landscape, has grown sick of it. It has long been saying that when you insult this country, at least this corner of the country, then "you insult me." Describing Middle America as backward, dumb, homophobic, racist, docile, pliant, creationist, fundamentalist, native, naive, bigoted, clingy, belligerent, gauche, provincial, homey, low-brow, simple or crude, is derogation aimed not at mere adjectives, but at real people. And the irony of such abusive language is exactly the irony of Frasier, for it reveals the left's blindness to its own contemptuousness, its own resentful lack of class. (And it shows the left forgets one critical demographic fact: elites are always in a minority, hence its broad insults injure the majority -- who will vote.)

Look. When Sarah Palin is dismissed for being a beauty queen or because she attended North Idaho State, while Barack Obama is deified because he went to an Ivy League school; when John McCain's class-standing at the naval academy is trundled out to denounce him while Barack Obama's editorship of the Harvard Law Review proves him "brilliant," elitism and not humility comes to mind. There are so many damning snide and condescending remarks issued by the left on any given day it is almost pointless to point out the obvious; a man may as well boldly announce he's discovered that the sky is blue.

Martin Crane's lesson is an important one, especially this campaign season, but I am not sure it is a lesson possible to heed. No doubt his words have made me more circumspect. But I wonder. I wonder.

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