Blast from the Past: The Contempt of the Elites

Bringing back another snippet from 2014:

"[...] As many folks have observed, those authors who yearn for the approbation of the cultural elite don't seem to care all that much about connecting with real-life, flesh-and-blood potential readers. First of all, the fiction they produce is calculated to repulse, not to inspire or engender sympathy. They create unlikable characters who move through pointless universes because to do otherwise is to be 'simple-minded.' They dwell on everything that is ugly and base and deviant because to do otherwise is to fail to write something 'profound.' When it comes to science fiction and fantasy in particular, they also indiscriminately attack common tropes, declaring them stupid and derivative without recognizing why they exist and why they persist. And overall, they have little respect for the common man's reason for reading, which is to escape the tortures of the ordinary.

Secondly, these status-seeking authors perversely resist anything that broadens access to books and to reading. Back at mid-century, when the paperback book finally put the classics into the hands of longshoremen and construction workers and touched off a miniature cultural renaissance among America's middle and working classes, the elites sneered. And today? Those self-same elites are raging over Amazon's dominance. I don't mean to suggest, of course, that Amazon should be nominated for sainthood. But when writers wax eloquent about the terrible loss of our book stores and the 'book store culture' and complain about the 'commodification' of their 'art' by large internet retailers, that signals to me that they live in very privileged zip codes and have no concept of what it's like to live in, say, rural Appalachia, where the nearest book store may be an hour away.

The common emotion - the overarching theme - that links the above tendencies together is contempt. At bottom, these authors seem to hate the regular people who make up their present-day core reading audience. Those folks, you see, are just too damned hidebound by their traditions and their genre-related expectations, which are uniformly racist, sexist, and every other '-ist' you can name. So why not abandon today's readers entirely and seek out the audience one can invent out of whole cloth in one's own mind?

[...]These authors don't want to attract the average reader. They are writing for themselves and for their like-minded compatriots. And as many have observed, this self-focused approach to creativity actually destroys literature from the inside."

It's amazing how many things I wrote years ago are still fully germane today.