"So, who is your ‘we’ *this* time, Kemo Sabe?"

Dear Dr. Bones,

The economic weather being what you can see out the MacL@@han Tube for yourself, it occurs to me to take a little _Schadenfreude_ upon those poor souls (poor judgers, anyway) who have pitched their ideological tents high atop the Great Blue Hill of H*rv*rchussets . It may not be quite Mount Washington up there yet, wind- and precipitationwise, but I ask you, sir, ¿five hundred millimetres of downpour on Friday? ¿¿Then six hundred on Monday?? ¿¿¿In August????

Even back in more settled times, the Blue Blazers’ self-inflicted situation was maybe a little problematical. "Conveniently located on Market Street in Bestembrighton, across from the Palace of Public Broadcasting," as the real estaters assured everybody, truthfully enough, never implied convenience vis-à-vis anywhere else in particular. Or did not imply it so explicity as to make a fraud litigation look promising.

If I remember my CliffsNotes™ to Comrade Professor Veblen whight, though, it may be that our provincial nobility and gentry select such out-of-the-vulgar-rut spots deliberately, to establish that they can afford to domicile themselves where the landscape is almost as sublime as the maintenance expenses. ’Tis not exactly CONSPICUOUS consumption, to be sure: the GBH itself may--nay, it does--stick out like a sore thumb, yet to spot the not un-McMansionlike abodes of the Blazers nevertheless requires either powerful binoculars or an engraved invitation. Or being on the receiving end of the aforesaid maintenance expenses.

(( Probably I had better move on, though, for as a mere Chicagolander by birth I have never grasped even the _literaliter_ of RE in MA: all that lovely waterfront land, choice properties that anywhere else would have been snatched up at once by Goulds and Rockefellers and Morgans first and foremost, with the Great Blue Hillbilly subclass of also-rans not very far behind, but here obviously belongs (I presume, legally) to the readership of, pardon my Prole, _The Boston Herald_. About the last place the spiritual scions of Governor Winthrop would care to be caught living in 2011 is the town named after His Excellency, an arrangement which can be explained by airport whiff and roar for the last few decades, but still, ¿how about the fifteeen score years before that? Similarly with Dorchester, Revere, Lynn the Unmentionable, and many more.

(( Conversely, ¿what on G*re's green earth do the GBH (and their worldly Evenbetters) find special about Weston 02493, "median income for a household in the town was $153,918 ... 97th most expensive zip code in a _Forbes_ survey in 2010"? Though pleasant enough, I suppose, that joint might have been picked by randomly throwing a yardarm, or a polo stick, or a Powe®Pointe® at the map. ))

But seriously, Charlie-on-the-MTA(-once-every-other-decade-need-it-or-not) finds himself unpanicked, somehow, even though "If Republicans win, we all lose money."

The _¿Kemo sabe?_ issue is blatant, although I guess it is barely possible his blueship is talking about Medicaid and the like, about, that is, our dear MA’s collective access to the Fedguv trough. In context, however, it seems all but certain that he is referring rather to secret-sector specuvestment and investulation, on Wall Street and elsewhere.

Perhaps our best analytic course is to work backwards from what we have in hand, stipulatively *defining* the WGBH ("We, the Great Blue Hillbillies") subclass as those who, on the one hand, possess at least a little gamblin’ money to lose in an up-market casino like NASDAQ, but, on the other hand, neither carry cards for the Party of Grant and Hoover nor think of themselves as members of The Class, on Whose behalf that neo-organization’s operations are now, and always have been, conducted. "Affluent without being positively needle-challenged," if you like. [*]



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[*] Dr. Marx and the Muses and you, sir, and I are not obliged to agree with the Blue Blazers’ self-classification, or with anybody else’s. We’d be in an impossible pickle if we were, considering that at least 9,843.06 Homeland™ers in ten thousand are absolutely sure they themselves personally belong to a blessèd and mysterious entity they love to call "The Middle Class."

(( The last word on that silly drool, as far as I am concerned, may be allowed to the bard O. E. Mandelshtam:

В Петербурге мы сойдемся снова —
Словно солнце мы похоронили в нем —
И блаженное бессмысленное слово
В первый раз произнесем . . . .

(( Words don't come much more _bessmyslennoe_ than “The Middle Class.” Not in Yank English, anyway. ))