July 5, 2013 by Erin

Fanfare for the Common Man

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a bit (a large bit?) of a snob. I recently told someone I could be snobby about anything—I laughed afterward, but I wasn’t really joking. I’m that person who talks about local produce, can’t stand American coffee or Twilight, and flies first class. (Ok, listen, it’s free. But just because I can’t actually afford first class doesn’t mean I can’t loathe coach.) In almost any category from art to lifestyle choices, I have a pretty secure opinion about what is best.

This is partly because I just really enjoy good things. Why settle for “meh” when such wonderful goodness exists in the world? However, every so often I get a glimpse into how unabashedly pretentious I can be, and, ugh, I annoy myself. So in moments when I start feeling my nose rising into the air, I ask myself this question: What would G.K. Chesterton do?

Yes, an obscure, early-twentieth century British writer is my guard against pretension. Irony abounds. I know.

But Chesterton is the guy who said, “I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong.” The first time I read that, I was like, yeah, right on. I think I was visualizing a farmer in a tweed cap drinking a pint at the local pub. But one day I realized that the ruck included not just my romantic farmer, but the guys at the NASCAR race, and I was like, oh crap.

See, I can be terribly judgmental about that sort of thing. Take yesterday, for instance. My friend Sarah and I were at downtown Lexington’s Fourth of July Festival and wandered into the pavilion to listen to the live music. Here’s the scene: a middle-aged cover band, complete with a stars-and-stripes bandana bedecked bassist, plays while a crowd of mostly older women with questionable hemlines gathers around. People are wandering around with $5 plastic cups half-full of Bud Light. I start thinking I’m way classier than everyone here. Then Chesterton slaps me in the face. Metaphorically, of course.

I learned from Chesterton that common things and ordinary people are extraordinarily valuable. And while I’m never going to condone vulgarity, my feeling somehow above a cover band and Bud Light doesn’t make me classy: it makes me stuffy.

When I take a step closer, it actually is all rather romantic: a ragtag community comes together to celebrate a shared history of freedom, with all the raucous high spirits befitting the commemoration of a document as solemn as the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … Raise a plastic cup to that, my friends. It’s like a scene straight from Hobbiton.

If you can believe it, Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” just came on my Spotify radio station. This blog post just became a trifecta of Chesterton, Tolkien, and Copland telling me to get a life.

But I’m still not flying coach.

#Blog Wars 2013