From time to time, I will hear someone on the news cautioning participants in a conversation that they are saying things in support of “class warfare.” Inevitably, that shuts the conversation even quicker than calling someone a racist (or trotting out some stomach-churning childishness like references to ‘the N word”) . Apparently any notion that doesn’t glorify socioeconomic stratification in our society is denigrated as “class warfare”, and all parties go scurrying for cover.

This has irked me for quite some time, but it never occurred to me to mention it on Slope until today, when I saw the following letter to the editor in that centerpiece of superb journalism, the Palo Alto Daily Post. The emphasis in yellow I added, although I encourage you to read the entire letter:

Now, let me say at the outset I understand what this person is saying, and in a certain world, I would actually agree with him. That “world” would have……..

In case you didn’t notice, we don’t live in a world anything like that. Instead, the rich got richer (much, much richer), none of them went to jail, and it’s as if nothing had ever happened (with the sole exception of Madoff, who was some kind of sacrificial lamb in the whole thing). So the notion that we live in some kind of meritocracy in which everyone plays by the rules is just plain wrong. The game is heavily, heavily, heavily tilted toward the “haves”.