He makes our battlefield plain as day.
By John Derbyshire, NR contributing editor. National Review May 22, 2000 Issue.
The following is exerpted from NR's cover story for May 22, 2000
Speaking for myself, as a product of the provincial English working class, it has been the snobbery of the Left that I have found most offensive. Behind media coverage of Lázaro González, his family, and his neighborhood, you can hear the gilded sneer of John F. Kennedy dismissing
Richard Nixon: "No class." Show a liberal a small, cheap tract house with a chain-link fence around it and plaster statues of the Blessed Virgin on the mantel, and watch his lip begin to curl. Lázaro González’s two DUI convictions have been well advertised in the media,
though many of us would regard DUI as less flagitious than, say, subornation of perjury. Washington Post, writers seem to be especially intent on rubbing in the deplorably unchic lifestyle of the González family. Richard Cohen: "How pathetic. An auto repairman stared down the United
States government." Mary McGrory: "I watched Lázaro González, an auto mechanic, standing up to the Attorney General of the United States . . ." Neither of these writers is happy about the disgraceful lèse-majesté of Lázaro González. Neither
has a clue that when an auto repairman can stare down the full power of the government, democracy is alive and well. They prefer Cuba, where such a thing could never happen.
And what moues of distaste on NBC’s Today program, when Andrea Mitchell revealed to Katie Couric that Donato Dalrymple, the man who rescued Elián from the sea and was with him when he was seized, was not a fisherman, as previously reported, but a housecleaner. Being a fisherman is
sort of respectable: Kennedys go sea fishing, after all, and isn’t there something about fishermen in that Bible thing? But a housecleaner! That is something else.
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