Shocked! I am shocked, I say! Yesterday, in an interview with Renee Montaigne on NPR's Morning Edition, Fox News blowhard Bill O'Reilly actually said something with which I agree 100%. He called himself a "bloviator." Amen! He's the biggest spewer of hot air I've ever heard. Of course, he didn't meant it about himself that way, but then again, he's not exactly the pointiest stick in the pile, is he?
He also kept his streak of saying the most incredibly stupid, jaw-dropping things alive by claiming to be the child of a working class family. He supports this by noting (1) that he grew up in Levittown, New York; and (2) that when his family took their vacations, they travelled by bus. "I never took a plane ride until I was 17," he boasted.
Alas for him, his evidence absolutely contradicts his claims. First, anyone who knows anything about 20th century US history knows that Levittown was the first modern subdivision in the USA. Yes, the houses were on the small side by contemporary standards, but by the standards of the World War II generation, they were a massive step up from living in apartments in the city. Second, just because Levittown has become a working class neighborhood does not at all mean it started that way. O'Reilly noted in the interview that his father had a college degree. That alone takes him out of the "working class," as far as I'm concerned.
Now if his father had been a fisherman, living and working at the docks on Long Island, then I'd have cut O'Reilly some slack. Working on a fishing boat is a classic blue collar, working class job. But living the life of O'Reilly's childhood [pun intended--Ed.] most assuredly was and is not a blue collar life. Not on Long Island, which is (except for the docks) where the prosperous live.
Besides, "vacations"?!? I don't care that his family rode the bus. That his family got a vacation every year at all means his family was not working class. Puh-lease! My dad was a career NCO in the Air Force, and my mother was a career civil servant, who had to change jobs every time Dad got reassigned. Neither one of them had a college education, though they both worked towards it in their later years. The only "vacations" we ever got were when we travelled from one end of the US to the other to visit all the relatives on both sides of the family every time my dad's Air Force career required us to move. We had about a week to accomplish it each time, too. So it's not like we got to stop and see the Grand Canyon or anything. It was 10-12 hours a day in the car, stopping to sleep at what even I, at grade-school age, could see was a cheap motel [it was all we could afford, you know--Ed.], and then driving on for another 10-12 hours the next day. That isn't exactly a "vacation," now, is it?
O'Reilly even claims he knows why the Dubya Administration went so horribly wrong [this after spending the past eight years loudly defending it against all reason--Ed.]: it suffered from "Rich Guy Syndrome," which O'Reilly defines as the notion that somehow everything will always work out, because, due to Daddy's money, it always has. I do not quarrel with O'Reilly's definition of "Rich Guy Syndrome." Indeed, I tend to agree with it. But my mother puts it best and more colorfully: "He started the game on third base and thinks he hit a home run." But it's not as if Dubya didn't get his money until last week--so why hasn't O'Reilly bothered to say this before now?
Still, I shouldn't be surprised that Bill O'Reilly doesn't want to hear the facts--he's already made up his mind. He likes his version of reality better than the actual facts. So he's just doing what all the other people of his political ilk do. He thinks he's a "bold fresh piece of humanity," but he's really just full of bold fresh crap.
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