[Prestidigitweeze]

It's possible my early memories of the Guardian were colored by the circumstances in which I first read it: during a week-long visit with my father in the UK. On that visit, reading it seemed a partial remedy for the behavior of certain people in the area in which he'd decided to live, and those around the site where he worked. The latter seemed to dislike him because he had chosen to hire, at every level of a complex project, working-class employees whom he felt deserved the first shot.

When he worked on other projects in the States and in India, I'd been accustomed to either seeing or picturing him treated with respect. Yet in this setting, ostensibly the one he'd come from himself, it seemed clear that certain people didn't like him. Certain of his neighbors, in particular, seemed quite annoyed with him, perhaps because of his abrupt appearance in the neighborhood, the prominence of the house he chose (he had an obsession with living on the tops of hills), his hiring practices and, of course, his American wife.

About that: My step-mother told me a story. One afternoon, a gathering of ladies from the neighborhood called her up to insist she have tea with them at once. She politely declined, at first, explaining that she was in the process of cleaning out the garage and hadn't dressed properly for a social event. Nevertheless, the woman on the phone kept insisting she must come right away and at last my step-mother gave in. When she arrived there, she was mortified to discover that every other lady in the house was dressed to the nines. She realized in that moment she'd been set up to fail. The ladies had fun smirking at her getup. They also professed to be bewildered at her activities, and asked how she herself could possibly stoop to cleaning out her own garage instead of having someone do it for her.

To escape what I felt was a rather unwelcoming climate, and to elude the effect of those disapproving individuals, I found myself riding into the city rather often. In my favorite pub (which would not serve any lunch item, even an appetizer, one moment past lunchtime), the Guardian seemed to offer something decidedly more progressive and humane than the ever-present Sun as I waited for the kitchen to reopen.

Then, too, we had never really had tabloid papers at home. My true mother was a teacher and tabloids seemed manipulative to her: overly broad and overtly opinionated, telling you what to think when all you wanted was enough information to work it out yourself. This is what she tried to teach her students as well as her own children.

I'm not saying the Guardian's target audience was working class. I'm saying their political conscience used to support it. There's a difference between a publication's being written for a group of people and simply defending them. Call me clueless, but in the early 90s, when I visited my father, I had the impression certain writers and editors at Guardian respected and cared about the working class. At the very least, they had its economic back.

I don't really have a problem with the Guardian's waxing self-righteous, though perhaps my own guilt-laden background makes middle-class guilt seem natural.

What I didn't expect was that they would become to the Morning Star what the New York Times or Salon is to Indymedia.

Even now, when the Guardian seems more complacent and snobbish than it ever should have been, I can't quite comprehend why anyone thinks the Sun is closer to showing true concern about the working class. Have the people who feel this way not fully appreciated Mr. Murdoch's methods, which amount to pseudo-populist transvestism?

Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas? details the ways in which American conservatives, largely through old school cold war alarmists, Newscorp and right-wing think tanks, learned to gut the economic concerns of social activism in the 30s but retain its language and project its working class contempt for elitism. The difference was that the elitists were now fingered as people who supported liberal social programs. A sleight of hand caused people who worked hard for a living to wrongly associate their work ethic with the idea that government purse strings should be tight even when their neighbors couldn't find work, their own children were sick, and people well above them were siphoning off taxpayers' money for social umbrellas and fattening their bank accounts with the spoils. This recycled rhetoric's subversion was not done in direct opposition to the good of America's working class. It also sought to subvert their thinking in ways that did them the most harm when they thought they were looking out for themselves. People are fond of calling Americans stupid for falling for that sort of thing, but I don't feel that's true. It was a very carefully manipulated substitution of one system of symbols for another that looked identical to most people, and its implementation in the language of the news media allowed conservatives to change people's perception of government and political language on a subconscious level.

That's what Murdoch's other publications seem to be doing in other countries as well.

I laughed when I read B0ned0me's comment about "liberal-leaning types," as his characterization of the Guardian was intentionally funny and it succeeded. But I can't help noticing that this dismissal of it as the paper of well-off liberals is exactly how certain right-wingers in the States like to describe publications that support ideas like national health care.