Devon, PA.  The Wall Street Journal reports one angle on what I just knew would become a controversy.  If it were the New York Times reporting, one could safely expect the article would be an adoring contemplation of what beer we should all drink now that we’ve heard the pallette preference of the President.

Ignoring the many other amusing thoughts that froth up from this story, I would just like to observe how racist and classist it is of our President to invite a white Boston cop over for a beer.  Why?!  Because he’s a blue collar in Cambridge, rather than a white collar meritocrat?  Is our President so blinded by bigotry that he cannot understand police officers are capable of taking pleasure in the same deracinated delectations as the Starbucks and Soy chomping, Thai basil sniffing, California roll chop-sticking, rissotto-insty-pack boiling,  advanced-degree holders of our technocracy?

Now, had old George W. Bush made the invitation, we’d know it was sincere.  He once asked reporters gathered outside his Crawford ranch if they’d be more comfortable back in air conditioning, savouring their “brie and cheese.”  Pleonasms are the soul of authenticity.

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James Matthew Wilson
James Matthew Wilson
James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from art, ethics, and politics, to meter and poetic form, from the importance of local culture to the nature of truth, goodness, and beauty. Wilson is also a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, and The American Conservative. He has published five books, including most recently, a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). Raised in the Great Lakes State, baptised in the parish of St. Thomas Aquinas, seasoned by summers on Lake Wawasee (Indiana), and educated under the Golden Dome, Wilson is scion of a family of Hoosiers dating back to the early nineteenth century, and an offspring of Southside Chicago Poles whose tavern kept the city wet through the Depression (and prohibition) years.  He now lives under the same sentence of reluctant exile as many another native son of the Midwest, but has dug himself in for good on the margins of the Main Line in Pennsylvania with his beautiful wife, dangerous daughter, and saintly sons. For information on Wilson's scholarship and a selection of his published work, click here. See books written and recommended by James Matthew Wilson.

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6 COMMENTS

  1. I myself thought it was a very inauthentic cocktail hour with no Colt 45, Mad Dog 20/20 nor even the eternal favorites of Thunderbird and Grenadine or the ulcerists favorite concoction: The White Cadillac, Scotch and Milk…an unholy violation of the finer sensibilities of anyone who might love the poetry of Robert Burns.

    another day, another White House Kabuki

  2. Reason #103 to hang out on the Front Porch: It will improve your vocabulary.

    And to boot, I am peeved, simply peeved, that The Great Man did not consider my own humble offering of Weasly Pilgrim Pale Ale. It must be because it comes in unlabeled bottles with a layer of yeast stuck to the bottom.

  3. […] James Matthews Wilson at Front Porch: Ignoring the many other amusing thoughts that froth up from this story, I would just like to observe how racist and classist it is of our President to invite a white Boston cop over for a beer.  Why?!  Because he’s a blue collar in Cambridge, rather than a white collar meritocrat?  Is our President so blinded by bigotry that he cannot understand police officers are capable of taking pleasure in the same deracinated delectations as the Starbucks and Soy chomping, Thai basil sniffing, California roll chop-sticking, rissotto-insty-pack boiling,  advanced-degree holders of our technocracy? […]

  5. You didn’t mention that he also invited the black university professor over for a beer, too. Why not imagine that Obama just likes to drink beer? Because he’s black, or because he’s “an elite”? I have the distinct impression that you’d be complaining about this *whatever* Obama said. It isn’t at all clear to me how you could construe the invitation as *racist* — as though black people don’t drink beer? Perhaps you don’t know many black people, but I can assure you that beer transcends both race and class boundaries. The fact that you somehow believe that Bush would have been sincere if he had done the same thing, as though his whole Texan cowboy persona weren’t an incredible facade (you know *he’s* one of those white northeastern elites, right? You remember that his daddy was president of the United States?), suggests that you’re just being partisan.

  6. It is always a cynical pleasure to rediscover that, in a society entirely dependent on ironic and figurative expression, there are still people incapable of reading in any other way than the literal. In a word, DJR, it was a joke. Thank God you are at least equipped to read a Stop sign.

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