Acute Angles - Everybody Can Be Above Average

by David Fidelman

There used to be a time when only the elite were permitted to be snobs. A proper snob had to have the right background, have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower, and had to have gone to one of the elite universities. Snobbery involved old money, cotillions, debutante balls and the Social Register. Today snobbery has become completely democratic. It has become a hot item in popular culture, and a proper subject of study for sociologists. Now anybody can be a snob, regardless of race, creed, color, ethnicity or income level. All you have to do is pick the proper field for your snobbery.

Mensans, of course, automatically fall into the snob category. Pity the humiliation of the candidate who misses by a half percentage point, and falls into the upper 2½ percentile instead of the required 2 per-cent. Perhaps real snobbery consists of being eminently qualified for Mensa, and not joining. This article is intended to help its readers find other areas in which they can individually feel superior. Some of the obvious things to be superior about are education, income level, good taste, cultural preferences, and high-achieving children or grandchildren, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. For example, if your apple dumplings are the talk of the neighborhood, you need go no further.

Whenever you ask someone what the good programs are on their cable channels, they invariably tell you about the History channel, or Discovery, or A&E or Bravo. If they don’t have cable, they tell you how they mostly watch public television. Obviously they’re trying to show off their intellectualism. You can easily feel superior to these people because you’re not trying to be pretentiously intellectual. Like the salesman walking out of the theater after a performance of “Death of a Salesman” who was overheard saying, “That New England territory was never any goddam good.” By your standards, popular culture is far more important than the archaic culture of a narrow-minded few. Unless you’re one of the people who prefer the History channel, classical music and translations of Greek dramas (or perhaps even read them in the original language). In that case, things are exactly reversed, and you can look down your nose at popular culture.

Try to assess your personal strengths to find out the best field to be snobbish in. Think of the things you do, or are good at, compared to other people. You may be a connoisseur of fine wine. Or you may be expert on which are the best inexpensive wines. Either of these is a talent not to be sneezed at. You may not like wine, but you order your martinis with Tanqueray Ten. Or your margaritas with Cuervo Gold and Grand Marnier. Or drink only Johnny Walker Blue Label. Those preferences automatically qualify you. Dom Perignon, Veuve Clicquot and Cristal are nice, but not many of us can afford to demonstrate our good taste with $170 a bottle champagne.

There’s a generally accepted pecking order among occupations. The highest-ranking ones are doctors, research scientists, college professors and, of course, Nobel Prize winners. Also plumbers because they are so high priced. Unfortunately, most of us cannot aspire to such distinction. In Hollywood, writers are at the bottom of the heap – there’s a standard show-business joke about the movie starlet who was so dumb that she dated a writer. These days you don’t want to admit that you are or have been a lawyer or the CEO of a major corporation.

If you know something about art, it’s easy to be a snob. All you have to say to demonstrate your superiority is, “If it matches the sofa, it isn’t art.” Or, as one connoisseur was overheard saying to another, “He’s terribly prolific, which is awful, because he’s also terribly untalented.”

You can be snobbish about your infirmities. It’s not considered good form to take advantage of a really serious illness, unless you’ve recovered or been cured. Curable unusual conditions are best for snobbery — like the bite of a rare tropical insect. You can be proud of phobias like obsessive-compulsive behavior or attention-deficit disorder.

If all else fails, you can always feel superior about your lack of snobbishness — call it reverse snobbery. Reading the comic strips in the daily newspaper indicates your disdain for pretentious intellectualism. When other men boast about their sexual prowess, you can take pride in your lack of it. Frugality is a sign of scorn for phony materialistic values. Driving an old but good used car shows that you disapprove of ostentatious display of affluence. If you’re still driving that Chevy you bought right after World War II, you qualify as a classic car buff.

Reverse snobbery makes humility something to be proud of: “I’m more humble than you are.” The popularity of reverse snobbism may some day lead to contests to select the Most Humble Person of the Year. And it’s conceivable that one day a contest loser may even sue the judges because they improperly overlooked some of his lack of achievement.