‘Elite’ Minds Are Asking: Where’d We Go Wrong?

As a child, in my pink jammies from Mrs. Rattenberg’s dry goods store, I prayed every night, “and please God, don’t let me grow up to be a member of the cultural elite.”

All this time, I thought my prayers had been answered.

Dan Quayle’s speechifying these past weeks had rolled right off me. I’m not Murphy Brown. Sometimes I even forget to watch “Murphy Brown.” I admit my bookshelf extends beyond “Great Moments in the NFL” and one of those little safes that looks like a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book, but I still have my “Classics Illustrated” comics. Doesn’t that count for something?

Then I heard Quayle misspelled potato at a school spelling bee and realized in one terrible moment how far I had fallen from grace.

Talk about your handwriting on the wall--God help me, I went to the National Spelling Bee as a kid.

Where are the 12-step programs when you need them? I had to say it aloud to believe it: My name is Patt, and I am a member of the cultural elite.

Again and again, I asked myself, how could it have happened? I grew up in the Farm Belt, was reared to work hard and pay my bills and practice the piano when I could and the Golden Rule all the time. Now the vice president says I am the one undermining America. Dan says “potatoe,” I say “potato.” He works for the Education President. He must know.

In a way, you can’t really blame Quayle. Suspicion of culture is practically genetic among folks at the shallow end of the pool. Reagan was common-man proud of his C average in college. George Wallace yammered on about “pointy-headed” lib’rals. Adlai Stevenson got slammed as an “egghead”--by a columnist who defined it as a man “interested in ideas and in the words used to express those ideas.” (It was Eisenhower, though, who had a motto in Latin enshrined on his desk.)

And of course Spiro Agnew, junior partner of the only President/vice president team to resign, laid it on about the “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

It looks like there’s a lot of backpedaling for me to do.

Science? I have suggested that we take global warming seriously. Dan has suggested that people might be able to breathe on Mars because it has canals, and canals mean water and water means oxygen. And to think that some moron of a science teacher once gave me an A.

Geography? Dan had excoriated--no, wait, I can’t use those ten-dollar words anymore. Dan had chewed out “the cultural elite in Hollywood and elsewhere . . . .” Most people I know--people who have graduated to using the kind of pencils that have erasers on them--would never have pinpointed the nation’s cultural elite in Hollywood, cradle of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and “The Newlywed Game.”

I realize now that I’d let my guard down. As the years went by, I began to think that there had never been any real danger of me becoming one with the cultural elite. That was for people like Albert Einstein and Lillian Hellman and the Founding Fathers including Benjamin Franklin, who invented the lightning rod and a stove and was ambassador to France, where he even spoke the language.

I thought I wasn’t in that class. But now I know--it’s William Figueroa and Sally Jessy Raphael and me, elite and doomed.

I called home to get my bearings after this big emotional megillah, and I have to say that my daddy isn’t taking kindly to all this. If he weren’t out fishing for bass, he’d let Dan Quayle know he doesn’t appreciate the things he’s been saying about his little girl.

Until he retired a couple of years ago, my dad made his living climbing poles to work on power lines. It was hard and dangerous work, and not a few of his friends died doing it, but he loved it, even though in the early days especially, things could get pretty thin before payday.

So he was pleased that his kid got top grades and a scholarship and a fine job she can do sitting down, and it’s a damn good thing she did, he’d tell you, because he didn’t have the influence to get her into the ladies’ room down at the Sunoco station, much less into the National Guard.

And now this. Dad, I’m sorry I let you down.

This weekend I’ll be ridding my shelves of the artifacts of my misspent life.

I’ll start with the easy stuff--the Trivial Pursuit game, the Willa Cather novels. Then I’ll move to the Spanish and French poetry . . . the Stephen Hawking and Lewis Thomas . . . and maybe end up with the leather-bound scholars’ edition of the Britannica. Better to make a clean break than try to do it in stages.

Maybe I can still keep the pen and pencil set I won in the National Spelling Bee, if I promise not to put them to good use.

Does it help that I didn’t win?