We hear a lot about self-hating Jews and self-loathing homosexuals. I myself was accused in the Herald Tribune a while back of being a self-loathing Canadian. Well, there’s a lot of it about—self-loathing, I mean, not self-loathing Canadianism, which would seem to be a more specialized craft.

Take, for example, many of the men and women who leave their humble precincts to make it big in the artistic world. Swanning about backstage, they quickly discover that the world in which they grew up is regarded by their peers as rather déclassé. Not because they’re “working class.” Au contraire, if they’d come from generations of horny-handed sons of toil, they’d be all the rage. If they were the first in their line not to be working down the coal mine from the age of twelve, they would be doted on like newborn puppies at the Royal Shakespeare Company. But, alas, socioeconomic reality in the developed world being what it is, statistically speaking most people are likely to come from what the British call the “lower middle class”—which is very different from upper middle class, as upper-middle-class people will tell you. In the United Kingdom, they grade these things: Mrs. Thatcher was said to owe her election victories to what the demographic analysts call her popularity with the “C2s”—i.e., the lower middles. That was pretty much the coup de grace as far as their standing with the intellectual class went. The concomitant of the artistic elite’s “solidarity” with