What about the Barleywine-track?

Forgive me father, for I'm an elitist. 

I can't shake the feeling that I'm fitting into some stereotype or another that has negative connotations to much of society. I don't have cable television in my house, or network television for that matter, our T.V. isn't hooked up to any outside source. I'm convinced television news programs are meant to sow despair and fear, and play on ignorance. Granted, there is PBS, but it doesn't quite make up for Fox News. To continue with public broadcasting, I think the only time the radio in my car has left NPR over the last two or three years is when my room-mate drives it and leaves it on a country station. I get my news from various sources published on the internet, independently verified between them all so I can take as much bias off of what I'm fed, and get as many facets to the story as possible. Thanks to some well informed friends, I now read The Economist to get the 'how and why' to compliment the 'what, when, where' I get from news sources.

My studies in college have left me with a taste for classical music as well as Jazz. I've worked as a band director so I listen to music with 'composer' listed with it instead of 'artist' I don't listen to pop radio anymore, though I'm continually discovering new music.

I'm a complete snob about beer and drink microbrew. I started my life after high school in Deutschland for a few months and it had irreparable effects on my taste in beer and in, well, political outlook and standard of living.

Oh yeah, I have a Mac.

I don't hold those who don't share my views in contempt, but I feel that there's been a stigma associated with the way I live and the way I think. When the media started going off about the "Beer track" and the "wine track" to describe different types of voters I didn't think too much about it, but the more I did, the more upset I got. The terms are completely divisive, especially when coupled with the ideas that those on the "wine track" are aloof, or labeled "brainy liberals." Labeled brainy to be viewed as a derogatory term. Are we in high school? Is not-thinking really an activity Americans prefer? Are the 'kitchen-table-beer-drinking-voters' relieved of their civic duty to make informed decisions as to how their country is to be run? This comes back to my gripe that what's 'American' is shifted very far to the right of center. Very little separates the 'beer track' of the democratic party from the "solid south" of the Roosevelt era, except that region is no longer held by Democrats and is now motivated to vote based on religion. (I swear I'll come up with something else to write about, really). Anyhoo, watch out for those crazy liberals, they might start doing things like thinking, and lord knows what trouble that might stir up.

I'd like to think of something witty to end this post, but I have to go help my brother with his math homework, and take my dad to dinner. Mostly cause I'm a bad son and didn't do so yesterday. No, wait, I think I've got it. I'll take a quote I've heard spouted by my favorite Wookiee a time or two before. One by the historian Charles Beard:

"It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."

Prost!