What the Left is really saying.

Consider the local foods movement.

It's really this insulting:

Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

Ouch.

But, y’know — she’s right.

For example, in the official Edible Schoolyard Journal there is an article about the school’s program for sending students with learning problems to work in the garden for a week. In the minds of the educators who came up with this idea, it seemed so glorious: putting the disaffected urban youth back in touch with the land, teaching them all sorts of lessons about hard work and long-term planning. But as this picture from the journal shows, the students “turned five huge heaps of compost and cultivated a long bed in the back of the garden,” which, to the skeptical eye, seems like a giant step backward — basically, putting the minority kids out to do hard labor. All that’s missing from this picture is a sheriff with reflecting sunglasses and a shotgun, making sure the convicts on the chain gang don’t try to run.

Emphasis in original. And this movement is centered in California, which as the author stresses, is one of the few places in the US that has the climate and soil to even pull off being able to grow all your food locally.

But read it all. See the vanity and condescension required for such views.

Let’s get real, people: Globalization is the best thing that ever happened to mankind. Most of the edibles you enjoy on a daily basis come from thousands of miles away, grown in climates where you wouldn’t want to live: Coffee, sugar, chocolate, wheat, rice, cinnamon, vanilla — the list is endless. Civilizations have risen and fallen in pursuit of new foods. The Romans conquered North Africa to get access to its wheat fields; the Arabs invented international capitalism by gaining control of the spice trade; The French and the English colonized half the globe to bring home sugar and tea. The story of the last 4,000 years is the story of our quest for exotic foods.

And here comes the locavore movement to say, in essence, Let’s go back to neolithic times when we only ate what grew in the immediate vicinity. I say: Screw that. We worked hard as a species to gain access to every imaginable kind of food that this planet can grow. I’m not about to give it all up now just so I can feel a little more smug.

Ed Driscoll has related thoughts.

Including this bit from VDH

Yet rarely is voiced the common denominator. High Liberalism is now a psychological manifestation, by which the very rich, immune to both the realities of tough living and the hurt of high taxes, finds solace, self-worth, penance even, by sympathy for big government entitlement for the less fortunate whom they connive hourly to avoid. Prep schools are jammed with the children of those who damn charter schools and vouchers; environmentalism’s most articulate advocates of small is better live in ways undreamed by the masses they wish to rein in. The greatest advocates of public expenditure, whether a Rangel, Geithner, or Daschle, are quite busy ensuring that they themselves will not have to pay for it all.

You pay to ameliorate their guilt.

And what happens if you dare to complain or vote against your "betters"?

Well now we go to Steven Green who comments on Charles Krauthammer's distillation.

What happened in Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two[Steven adds #3] cherished axioms:
(1) The people are stupid.
(2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.
(3) “We’re just not far left enough.”

Read all the links.



And we'll end with Klaven on Reality versus "Reality"?