Today's snark

I really need to stop reading articles by Elite Writers who make Anthropological Junkets into Middle America. They are always unkind, in a "let me tell you, girlfriend!" after-work-gossip kind of way. The superiority just oozes off the page until you want to pull on gloves. It doesn't make it better when the writer admits to succumbing to the low-brow behavior he's writing about, with self-deprecating air.

The latest is an article in the NYTimes about a year-round Christmas store in Frankenmuth, Michigan. The store is a vast repository of every cliche and then some. I would find it fascinating, fun and just a little scary. The article's writer viewed it like a representative of a superior race of aliens set down in a backwater of Earth: he found it quaint and earnestly tasteless, populated by a people who knew no better than to think it was a wonderful thing.

I'm just so tired of it.