Some things are unintentionally revealing. Often this occurs when someone is so sure they understand things that they judgmentally step outside their groupthink. They then are unwittingly exposed, an emperor without clothes.
As an aside, it is worth remembering that the phrase “the emperor has no clothes” comes from the 1837 Danish fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Hans Christian Andersen.
In the tale, an emperor is tricked by two con artists who claim they can make the emperor magnificent clothes that are invisible to anyone stupid or unfit for their position. As they don’t want to appear stupid or unfit, everyone—including the emperor—pretends to see the clothes, but of course, he’s naked. Finally, a child blurts out the obvious: “But he isn’t wearing anything!”
This brings us into an interview in Literary Hub.
In this interview, Andy Hunter, the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org and co-creator and publisher of Literary Hub, is interviewing George Packer, a writer for The Atlantic, on his new novel The Emergency.
The novel is a dystopian work of fiction that is supposed to give allegorical insights into the state of things today. Instead, it opens windows into the views of society’s self-described intelligentsia—the columnists at the major Left-leaning outlets, which certainly includes The Atlantic, and parts of academia and Hollywood and more.
In this work of fiction, government collapses overnight. It is just gone. With the common thread of a federal government no more, the last of the cultural ties between residents of cities (burghers in the novel) and rural citizens (yeomen) vanish.
Packer describes the city folk as educated and sophisticated; whereas the country folk are rubes who can farm or change the oil on a truck.
In a real-life discussion of the differences between rural and urban America, the interview became very revealing:
Andy Hunter: Like when we first drove to upstate New York after Trump was elected in 2016 and my daughters realized, oh my god, there’s tons of Trump supporters here at the state fair and I was like, don’t worry, most of them are good people.
George Packer: They’re good people, they’re friendly, they’re very capable, they know how to fix an engine.
Andy Hunter: There’s NRA gear and tons of MAGA hats and my daughters are just like, what is going on here?
George Packer: Yeah, “these are the enemy.”
By “these are the enemy” he is referring to people from today’s rural America who cherish their right to keep and bear arms—the enemy, in his worldview, stand in contrast to the “educated” elites from the cities. But then, in this and other statements, Packer reveals his ignorance and bias and fear.
Andy Hunter soon asks about this divide: “To what extent was the yeomen and burghers an allegory for rural and urban America?”
“I mean, we have all kinds of ways to see our social divisions,” says George Packer. “Race is one, religion, and the two political parties. But I believe, more and more, that the fundamental division is between the educated and the not so educated.”
In this delineation, Packer casts himself as a member of educated elite who see NRA members as “the enemy,” as the uneducated, unsophisticated class who walk the rural lands with their knuckles almost dragging on the ground.
If Packer would lower his gaze so he can see beyond his chin, open his intellect and look around his urban environment, and the not-far-off small towns, he would notice that a lot of NRA members live in cities. He’d see that, statistically, rural areas are often safer and are often home to his cherished universities. He might even have to confront the U.S. Constitution and the principles upon which the Founders drew to write it and ratify it and then to add the U.S. Bill of Right to it, as amendments.
Then, as his head spun, he might start to realize his elitist propaganda is his real problem. He has decided not to understand the people walking the city streets around him. He has decided he is better than them. He has decided not to even understand the liberty he has been bequeathed by the Founders and by so many who came after the founding period—including many who gave their lives for our freedom.
Just maybe, maybe he might then have an epiphany such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about in the Gulag Archipelago, when Solzhenitsyn confronted the realization that he was partly to blame for his imprisonment because the seeds of tyranny live within every human being—including himself. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn concluded that evil is not only a feature of political systems but is also a moral failing individuals must confront inside themselves.
It is too bad that, even when digging deep into a dystopian novel, this Atlantic writer could not honestly look around and try come to terms with America—including the millions of Americans who put their money down to be a part of an association that defends this basic human right.
Instead, in the end, Packer is not wearing anything.
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