CHAPTER FIVE   

The Making of an Elitist

Being elite does not necessarily have anything to do with being Elite.

Someone in the Elite may have some achievements, but achievements are not necessary for membership and they are certainly the exception rather than the rule. The American Elite, and other elites around the Western world, consider themselves a meritocracy, yet they never demand that any of their members actually show any merit. You can fail and fail and fail, and many in the Elite do, and yet they still remain Elite.

Being Elite is not about being elite. It’s about choosing to identify as Elite.

How do the Elite think and feel? What makes them select the path to Elitism, because it is a path you have to select. You have to want to be in the Elite. You choose it, even when you are born to it.

West Los Angeles is a majority-Elite enclave just east of Santa Monica and separated from America by several parallel ten-lane freeways and a lot of attitude. It was also Obama’s abused lover. The inhabitants slavishly devoted their time and money and fervor to his cause even as he treated them like one of Bill Clinton’s flings. For Obama, gridlocking Westside traffic and trapping the faithful was the equivalent of telling his most slobbering fans to put some ice on it.

You see, Obama did the most evil and odious thing he could to his own people—he would land at LAX about fifteen miles to the south and then take a motorcade north up the 405 and through the side streets on his way to someplace like Jeffrey Katzenberg’s pad for a soiree with the gang from DreamWorks, some other studio execs you never heard of, and a few personalities whose names you can’t mention anymore because they got all handsy and grabby with young gals or younger guys who didn’t get the memo that while you kept your mouth open during, afterward you kept it closed tight.

But long before #MeToo became #Gee​Liberals​In​Hollywood​Washington​And​The​Media​Acted​Exactly​How​We​Thought​They​Acted, West Los Angeles was the Los Angeles you think of when you think of Los Angeles. Robert Downey Jr. might be getting a latte ahead of you at a Starbucks in Brentwood. There are Bentleys and Aston Martins, most driven by sketchy, swarthy dudes whose business cards read “Producer.” Sports legends decapitate people on the leafy residential streets and get away with it. But West Los Angeles is not the reality of Los Angeles.

There are many different Los Angeleses. East Los Angeles has a vibrant Hispanic culture. West Los Angeles has armies of forlorn Hispanic nannies for rich white families being disgorged from the scores of dirty buses that run west down Olympic and Wilshire in the morning and being picked up by those same buses heading east after six. The beach cities have the surfers and affluent white guys who usually end up with Asian women. In West Los Angeles, that lifestyle is considered a bit too on the nose. In South Central, you have a large black community that is coming together to try to improve the lives of its residents. In West Los Angeles, or at least the swankier parts of it, when a black person appears you have a bunch of LAPD cop cars coming together to find out what he’s doing there.

West Los Angeles has the money vibe and a bit of the hipster vibe, but mostly it has a huge liberal vibe. Ted Lieu is its congressman, and calling him “dumb as a post” is a harsh and unwarranted attack on the brainpower of posts. Posts are, at least, useful. Ted’s entire oeuvre in Congress appears to be tweeting pics of himself with famous Hollywood perverts and issuing dire warnings that Trump is Hitler + Mussolini + Mao + Stalin + Castro.

Well, maybe not the last three—to liberals, they totally meant well, unlike Trump.

West Los Angeles is the land of “Trump is not my president,” though Trump totally is their president. But the residents apparently feel that if they hold their breath long enough and resist resist resist, they will one day awaken and Trump will be gone and left at the helm in the White House will be… Mike Pence.

Oops.

Long-range strategic thinking is not a big thing in West Los Angeles. In fact, there’s no need to think at all. You just open your mind and your heart and let the liberalism flow through you like Luke with the Force. And to further confuse the sci-fi metaphors, you must accept assimilation because resistance is futile.

This is where Kaden, our aspiring member of the Elite, was born into this world of lefty dogma and material comfort. His mom was a lawyer. He was a designer kid because she was thirty-seven when she decided a child was the next expensive accessory she simply had to have. She took time off to have him and never quite forgave him for slowing her ride down the rails of the partnership track. But she only dealt with him for a couple weeks before going back to work overseeing movie deals—she was the go-to gal for finding ways of ensuring that movies made for $10 million that gross $250 million never, ever made a profit, and thereby cut out all the folks who signed on with a promise of a piece of the back end.

Of course, thereafter, young Kaden was no trouble at all. He was Lupita’s problem.

Dad was a plastic surgeon—the beaches were filled with his bouncy, bouncy handiwork. Dad was born to be a doctor like his dad and also a liberal like his dad—when Kaden’s father was an idealistic intern he had treated Cesar Chavez for a hemorrhoid and it changed his life. From then on, Dad had been so impressed that he vigorously supported the United Farm Workers union by buying only union-picked lettuce and grapes, which was easy because that’s all the local market would sell. Kaden had noticed his father’s deep commitment to social issues and continued that family tradition by only buying lattes made with fair trade coffee that was picked by certified woke coffee pickers.

Every night, Dad would complain about how all civilized countries have a single-payer health care system. He spoke to a lot of citizens of those countries when they came here to America to get their medical care, so he totally knew the score. He read the New Republic until it turned too right wing, then switched to The Nation until it turned too right wing.

Now they lived in a big house north of Wilshire—it was vital that it be north of Wilshire because can you imagine not living north of Wilshire? Every four years, they did their civic duty and wrote checks to the Democratic National Committee. Every four years, they put signs for the Democrat in the front yard. It was always baffling when their guy (or gal) lost—they never saw any signs for Republicans around town. Dad still wondered what happened to Mondale Mania back in 1984—everyone he knew was feeling it!

Obviously, Ronald Reagan was the worst president imaginable, determined to get us into a war and, well, it was pretty obvious how much he hated black people. But then George H. W. Bush came along and, well, he was even worse than Reagan. He did get us into a war, which America unfortunately won. And, of course, you knew what Bush thought of black Americans—that went without saying.

Luckily Bill Clinton came along, and what a breath of fresh air. Clinton’s wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were clean and antiseptic and, best of all, started by Democrats, and they totally solved all the problems in the Balkans forever. Also, he loved black people. You could tell because he said so.

Clinton made draft dodging okay again, and Dad could now openly say that his moral opposition to opposing communist tyranny in Vietnam was why he had faked being homosexual to get out of the draft. Not that being homosexual was bad—he made it clear that he would have loved to have been homosexual if that was how he was born, and he had mostly not been. It was a little sad when Bill Clinton had imposed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” but it was really those rednecks, hicks, and racists still in the Democratic Party who made him. If only someday those people could be purged from the party—then there would be no stopping us!

The Republican attempt to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex was an outrage. What kind of Neanderthal would go into a moral panic about sex? And if Hillary Clinton—who seemed really awesome—was okay with it, who were we to judge?

Mom and Dad voted for Al Gore in 2000 and were devastated when he lost. It was clear, so very clear, that the Florida Supreme Court and not the United States Supreme Court should have made the final determination about those hanging chads. States’ rights were so important at the moment, after all.

George W. Bush, known around West LA as Chimpy Bu$Hitlerburton, was even worse, a million times worse than Reagan and Poppa Bush. Bush W. got us into another war. Luckily, Iraq turned into a quagmire for several years until, tragically, Bush 43 began winning it again. And he obviously hated African Americans. You could just tell.

John McCain and that awful, awful Sarah Palin would have been the worst of all. They would have kept winning the wars and they obviously hated black people, who by then were black again.

But luckily, Barack Obama came along, and if any member of Kaden’s family had had the capacity for religious sentiments they would have felt them then. Obama was urbane and well spoken, a stark contrast to the stuttering Texan mess of W.’s diction. He was highly educated—Harvard, everybody! Did you hear that? Harvard! And he was president of the law review. Sure, his college records never got released, and no, he didn’t publish a law review article, but he got into Harvard and got onto the law review. And he didn’t do anything in the Illinois Senate or the United States Senate, but he was a senator!

And that was enough. This guy talked well and a lot, and he checked all the boxes. He was the embodiment of the Elite, especially in the way that he had never actually accomplished anything before being elected president. Oh, and he was black, and in the theocratic tradition of liberalism, voting for a black candidate was a way to purchase an indulgence to cleanse you of your original sin.

Kaden was born into sin as an affluent white kid in the United States. There was a lot of guilt that he would be able to display down the road, even if he never felt guilty. Bearing liberal guilt was a lot like being an ancient sinner who changed into his oldest, rattiest clothes before he would cruise down to the temple to rend his garments while crying out in anguish about repentance.

Lupita raised Kaden with the kind of loving care you would expect from someone getting paid below minimum wage under the table. She even taught him Spanish—“Real Spanish, the authentic Spanish of the countryside of the real Mexico,” Mom had beamed, pronouncing the x as an h in what she assumed was the real Spanish style. Lupita nodded politely. She was from El Salvador.

After Kaden had run up to his mommy and announced “¡Soy un gringo pendejo!” and Mommy had hugged him because she was so proud of her lil’ citizen of the world, Lupita stopped with the Spanish. Instead, she flipped on the television and let him watch all the cartoons his mother forbade. He was sad when Mom and Dad let Lupita go the minute he was ten and could stay home alone after school. Marcela, the maid, and Juanita, the other maid, were just not the same.

Kaden and the rest of the local children would sometimes gather at the park and play. It was there Kaden began to learn about diversity as he realized that there were many different types of rich white kids. Some had red hair, some had yellow hair, some had brown hair, and all had an immigrant acting-mommy off to the side chatting in Spanish about what assholes her employers were.

It was in the competition for admission into kindergarten that Kaden first understood that some people were better than others. Obviously, there was something wrong with the kids at the public school because Mommy sure didn’t want him to go there. The word shithole was used, but certainly not in the racist way Donald Trump would use it years later. No, Mommy used it with love.

She took time off work to drag him to audition at a succession of tony private schools. The grim administrators would size him up and down and ask about his “development” and “readiness.” Luckily, when Kaden decided to eat the eraser on the principal’s desk, the principal had stepped out of the room. He couldn’t breathe and pointed to his throat. As she gave him the Heimlich, his mother hissed, “Don’t you screw this up by choking!”

It was clear that the schools were selective and that it was a sellers’ market. But still, the administrators could barely conceal their pride at their academic rigor. “This is one of the most exclusive schools in West Los Angeles, and you can be sure that Kaden, if selected, would be attending class with a truly distinguished group of fellow scholars. I’m really not supposed to reveal it, but Bea Arthur’s grandchildren are both enrolled here at the Brentwood Montessori Academy for Excellence.”

Mommy was sure stressed. One morning, she exploded in rage. “What are you thinking, Kaden? We have an interview in twenty minutes and you spill açai smoothie all over your romper? Don’t you want to go to Yale? Well, stop crying and act like it!”

They did a lot of classroom walk-throughs at the various schools. All the kids seemed pretty much the same. One of them was eating paste, and the teacher seemed very, very upset because Ashleighee was vegan and it was unclear whether the paste was animal product–free.

Kaden was eventually accepted into one of the fancier schools—the administration had decided they needed to add some diversity to the student body by accepting some kids whose families worked in the trades, like law and medicine. He was a good student. The first quarter he got a “Smiley ++” in “Self-Esteem.”

And once he got into the school, that was it. The stress vanished. Everything that came after was an afterthought. Kaden absorbed that lesson well.

His elementary school fed into a prestigious private high school—the thought of him enrolling in the Los Angeles Unified School District never entered into any of their heads. Every year, the private high school gave a couple of kids from Inglewood a scholarship. Voilà, there was some diversity.

The curriculum focused on making them “active participants in their own citizenship,” and his class learned about the threat of global warming caused by the use of fossil fuels. He typed out the last few lines of his freshman paper on the subject on his laptop while in the back seat of his Mom’s Mercedes S-Class as she sat idling in the morning drop-off line.

In fourth grade, they had begun his college application preparations in earnest. He needed a language and Spanish was too—what did his admissions consultant call it?—“unexceptional.” Japanese maybe? No, you didn’t want to go Asian—again, too unexceptional. Catalan? That was the ticket. Close enough to Spanish that he already had a base, but edgy enough because who the hell spoke Catalan? Besides, Barcelona was the height of cool for some reason—the divorced, middle-aged women who sorted through the piles of applications in the Ivy League admissions offices would see he was fluent in that language and swoon, dreaming of walking streets full of Gaudí-designed buildings and being wooed by tough yet tender Catalonian men.

But it was a struggle. His Catalan tutor, Franco, grimaced when Kaden tried out his limited Spanish.

Kaden was involved in sports, too. He played soccer and had a shelf full of trophies he had won for showing up. They didn’t play for points in the West Los Angeles league. “It’s about teamwork and the joy of sports.” His coach told him that the fact he had never scored a goal—that he had barely kicked the ball all season—did not mean he wasn’t crucial to the team’s success. “Sports aren’t about winning. Sports are about participating!” He did not need to mention that his participation would be noted on a future college application. If it weren’t for that block-check, none of the kids would be there.

In his freshman year, with his application deadline just two years away, he started a charity called “Meals for the Oppressed” where his mom would stop at a McDonald’s and buy a few dozen hamburgers and then give them to the local homeless people south of Olympic. He was not allowed out of the car, not allowed around the homeless, and especially not allowed around McDonald’s.

For their part, the bums loved college admission season. One kid distributed a bunch of bright red hats to the local shiftless and idle that read CARE ABOUT ME. Her charity was called Hats of Caring. She would eventually be admitted to Princeton.

Kaden received all A++’s in all his Advanced Placement classes. The SAT was key, and he had a tutor for that, too. He learned the math that would be tested, and the English that would be tested. In history, he learned about Europe’s history of colonial oppression, and how the American Revolution against colonial oppression was a reactionary spasm by a bunch of slave-owning white males whose sole goal was to subjugate women, minorities, indigenous peoples, the differently-abled, and the trans community. His school did not celebrate Columbus Day or Christmas, which Kaden thought had something to do with the Christians recognizing the birth of Santa Claus under a pine tree near Rudolph’s stable.

The Fourth of July holiday was no big deal, either, and his family only once ever considered flying an American flag. The thought had crossed his father’s mind right after 9/11, but he discarded it when it became clear that the real tragedy was the hateful backlash against practitioners of the Religion of Peace. Plus, Bush 43 was probably in on it.

By the time he graduated, he had read the works of Maya Angelou and studied the Harry Potter saga and its scathing critique of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government—the Iron Lady was pretty much Voldemort. He could not name a Shakespeare play, a president before Bill Clinton, or a book of the Bible (there was no copy in his house or in the school library). He was pretty sure that the Civil War ended when Abe Lincoln dropped the atomic bomb on Pearl Harbor.

Kaden didn’t know much about Islam except that all those bigots out there in Kansas and Texas and stuff hated Muslims, which meant they had to be okay. His teacher had also informed the class that the hijab was a symbol of female empowerment. He wrote that in his notes and, sure enough, it came up on a test. He got an A+++.

When he started noticing girls—by the mid-2000s people hung out; they didn’t date—his parents had “the talk” with him about sex. He was pretty clear on the mechanics already—his elementary school had started teaching them about it in second grade, and he had aced the quiz on sodomy. But his parents wanted to make sure that he understood that sex was a serious issue, and that he needed to obtain consent before moving to the next level of intimacy, because if he didn’t some lying bitch could screw up his whole future. Also, they said, women should be valued and respected, and always wear a rubber so some tramp won’t infect you with a disease.

Most important of all, his parents told him, they would totally pay if his partner needed an abortion. They would even give her a ride to a clinic without telling her parents if that’s what it took to keep his future secure.

He got into one of his target colleges back east, Columbia. His parents were thrilled, and so was he. Now that he was admitted, he could relax again. Which he did, for five years.

It was at college where, for the first time, he met strange, exotic people who were not from West Los Angeles or similar places. Sure, he had traveled before school. He had been to Europe and Japan, to New York City, and to Colorado to ski. And he had driven to Lake Tahoe once, also to ski, so it was not quite accurate to say he had never been east of I-5. He just hadn’t stepped out of the SUV except for gas until he reached the slopes.

He knew there was a town called Fontana, but he couldn’t find it on a map.

There was a guy in the dorms who was a little older and who seemed more serious than everyone else. While Kaden grew dreadlocks during his Bob Marley phase, the guy always kept his hair short. The others whispered that he had been in the Army or something before he went to college. Kaden had never met anyone who had actually been in the military before. He never even remotely considered joining up, nor had any of his classmates. He was pretty sure that the Army was not the one with the ships, but he wasn’t positive.

Kaden pitied the poor guy. Once, after some bong hits and Heinekens, he had stumbled over to the guy and apologized on behalf of America for him having been suckered into Bush’s illegal war for oil.

“I was in Afghanistan,” the Army guy replied, baffled.

“I know,” Kaden said, nodding. “Bush’s illegal war for oil.”

Later, Kaden wondered how someone… like that… could have gotten into that school. He worried that if people knew that Columbia’s standards were so low that even some soldier could get in, it could devalue his degree in communications.

Kaden had always considered himself a socialist, but college really helped him create an intellectual framework for what he was feeling. He read Marx and Engels and the works of Bernie Sanders, and he was excited by what he was learning. He did not bother taking any history courses, as there was no need to learn about the Soviet Union, or China under Mao, or the National Socialism of the Third Reich. After all, real socialism had never been tried, so what was the point?

Every once in a while, he would encounter an idea or opinion that challenged his own preconceptions. But not for long—as a defender of free speech, he felt he had a special responsibility to shout down and silence those who abused it by expressing ideas he disagreed with.

It was at Columbia where he decided to pursue journalism. He was bursting with opinions that he wanted to share with the world, and being a reporter seemed the best way to do that. After all, the newspapers, television, and the internet were all full of opinions. His journalism professor leveled with the class that the idea of objectivity was an outdated concept, unsuited to modern times when the audience needed the guidance of experts in the form of trained journalists to help lead them to the truth. Otherwise, they might embrace bad ideas and vote for Republicans.

That was the purpose of the institution of the press. Those in the class would take their places within this proud institution and ensure that it remained a beacon of enlightenment in the fog of parochial ignorance that engulfed so much of America.

“People are shallow and small-minded,” the professor warned his students. “It is your job to help them be better. And though they will not appreciate it, you have a responsibility to guide them to the truth. After all, democracy dies in darkness.”

Kaden nodded, and he accepted this great responsibility eagerly. He liked feeling that he was a part of something bigger, part of a special group of people with the training and education—the expertise—to make a difference.

Most of all, he liked not feeling like everyone else out there. After all, he was bringing the light that would keep democracy from dying. And most everyone else would spend their lives riding a tractor or loading boxes or whatever those other people did.

He would be special.

He would be Elite.

After graduation, he moved to Washington, DC, to start working for a news website covering the government. With his life experience, they scooped him right up.

Washington was very diverse, with young Elite graduates from all sorts of different colleges. He even made friends with someone who was originally from Alabama. She used to tell him how when she was a kid her parents made her go to church, and how her dad used to hunt deer. Obviously, she was disgusted by her troubled upbringing. For Kaden, it was a real education in how truly awful red America was. He knew his calling would be to fight against its ignorance and against the redneck monsters who dwelled there.

Washington under Barack Obama in the first couple years of his administration was an exciting city full of people working together to create a better tomorrow. When Obamacare was enacted, Kaden celebrated with a honey-cinnamon IPA in a bar packed with other ecstatic reporters. What a step forward! Of course, the right-wing media, including Fox—who the hell watched Fox, anyway?—was going crazy, telling lies about how you were not going to be able to keep your doctor if you liked him and how your family’s bills were not going to be cut by $2,500 a year.

And then the Republicans retook the House, and then the Senate. How did that happen? Clearly, the lies from Fox and the Koch brothers and the National Rifle Association and Fox tricked those idiots in the red states into voting Republican. It was outrageous—those idiots should have been voting for Democrats!

Now it was all hands on deck—Obama and the dedicated government officials under him needed all the help they could get. Kaden loved to break the big stories about Republican malfeasance whenever he could. And he was not above helping out a Democrat friend with stepping on an embarrassing story. After all, they were all working together, and this was a life or death struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

Darkness was, after all, where democracy died.

But there was a mass of people out there who were an obstacle to progress. Kaden didn’t know any of them. He had never driven out of the Beltway to find any of them, but they were out there.

Stupid.

Ignorant.

Racist.

Sexist.

Consumed with their ridiculous belief in their imaginary friend Jesus.

In love with their phallic-symbol assault rifles, although the mass shooters he and his media pals gave wall-to-wall coverage never, ever cooperated by being conservative Christian NRA members.

They were incorrigible, irredeemable, but it was Hillary Clinton who put it best. They were “deplorable.”

They were everything Kaden and his friends wanted not to be.

They were the enemy.

And they had to be crushed once and for all.

Luckily, The Smartest Woman in the World, the pantsuited savioress of Elite America, was going to bring down the righteous thunder upon them. It was a testament to their loathsomeness that they had selected Donald Trump—arrrgh, Donald Trump!—as their nominee. Trump could not possibly win. He shared their crassness, their moral bankruptcy, their stupidity. But his defiance—their defiance—could not just be forgiven.

They were going to pay.

Obama’s problem is that he had been too nice to the rabble. He hid his contempt for the Normals, sort of, and while he would mess with them, he did not make his disgust with them the centerpiece of his administration. But Hillary would. She was all about the payback for their daring to seek to interfere, for their daring to object.

Kaden and those like him were thrilled that Hillary Clinton would not pretend to be the president of all Americans. She would be the Avenger of the Elite. That’s what the Elite really wanted.

Their stupid religion? Sure, the Normals could keep it—within reasonable limits. They can do whatever they want in private, mostly, until the Elite got around to dealing with that. But for now, in public, they will acknowledge and bow down to the true Almighty, the government with Hillary Clinton at the helm.

Their concerns about immigrants? Too bad. It is long past time to replace an electorate that fails to understand its place.

Their jobs in coal and fracking? Better learn coding, because those industries are gone. And if that wrecks the economies of Texas and those other states, well, then maybe they ought to vote smarter next time.

And their guns? The Constitution is a living document that was never meant to be an obstacle to the government doing what it wants. The only people who should have guns are people who report to… the Elite. Armed citizens are citizens, not subjects—which is precisely the point, and the problem.

And yeah, their little girls are going to have to watch men in dresses come into their restrooms and pee. Why? Why is that so important?

Because it teaches the Normals who’s boss.

And then on November 8, 2016, the giddy anticipation Kaden felt, knowing that soon he would be helping to finally tame the rabble and put them in their place once and for all, turned to heaving, hilarious sobbing.

Hillary Clinton lost.

But Nate Silver had promised him! He was an expert on statistics, damn it! Science! And Rachel Maddow went to Oxford! Rachel, how could you let this happen?

It was the Normals.

They did this.

Those people out in states where Kaden had never been, doing jobs Kaden had never done, never even thought of, living lives Kaden could not even imagine, did it. They did it to him and every smug, spoiled, overeducated jerk who thought he had some sort of divine right to push them around.

The next morning, after obtaining explicit consent, Kaden hugged his girlfriend. Being attracted to women was a burden—he was bummed that he identified as cisgender straight, no matter how hard he tried to change that. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, just like his.

“I so respect you for rejecting patriarchal stereotypes and for so openly expressing your feelings and for being willing to sob in public last night,” she said, even though inside, his whimpering and weeping kind of disgusted her.

“Thank you,” Kaden whispered. “But we have to be strong. Now we have to act to stop the worst person ever to be president.”

He handed her a pink knit cap.

“He’s probably going to start a war,” she said.

“Yes, and he totally hates black people.” Then he donned his own pussyhat. “Now we must resist.”