Mark Oppenheimer writes a lovely article in Slate about his evolution as a snob and why he has to break the habit, now that he's a parent.
And yet I am not convinced that I can give up snobbery so quickly. Because as much as it could harm my daughters, it could also make them Oppenheimers. For after all, snobbery is one of the great midwives of human closeness. Almost nothing I can think of unites two people better than shared snobberies. I never feel more married to my wife than when we enter another couple's house for the first time and, on seeing that the television is a bit too large, or too prominently placed in the front room, look at one another and—well, I was going to say "arch out eyebrows," but of course we do not even need to do that. The mere look, the meeting of the eyes, does it all.
When she asks me to describe a town that I have seen on my travels, and I can use the shorthand of, "Well, you know—a lot of above-ground swimming pools," I am grateful that we are united in our dim view of above-ground swimming pools. Call this a shared aesthetic, call it a shared sensibility, but please do not lie: It is also a shared snobbery. And one reason that we feel so much that we belong together is that while we share much more, we share at least that much.
Uncomfortable snicker.
I admit to having ranted to my husband about a neighbor's affection for nine feet, inflatable Christmas decorations that take over the lawn every December. The piece de resistance is the nine foot, inflatable SpongeBob SquarePants in a Santa hat that sits on their roof. They don't have children, BTW. Now, I'm not the only one to roll their eyes at this display. One guy down the blocked mumbled something like, "it's bringing down our property values."
And, really, the snobbery flows both ways. The SpongeBob neighbors certainly roll their eyes at our 14 year old Toyota with the rusty dent in the back fender.
A few months ago, Steve and I bought a new sofa. Our old one was ten years old and the springs were hanging from the bottom. A sofa isn't a small purchase, so I spent a long time researching the perfect sofa and even cut out sofa shapes and arranged them on graph paper to make sure that it would fit properly. I showed up at Crate and Barrel with my little sofa paper dolls and picked what I thought was the most perfect sofa in the entire world.
I've been doing a lot of surfing at Zillow and Realtor.com in the past few months. When you get past the horror of photographs of short sale homes with dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, you also find a ton of homes that have been fixed up like ours. Same paint colors, same bedspreads, same kitchens. And also, in the living room, they have the same goddamn sofa. Fuck. It's predictable and boring.
It is terrible how stuff, and it's just stuff, is such a signal about bigger things. It defines your tribe. When you draw lines around your tribe, then you cut off opportunities to learn from other people. I'm with Oppenheimer here.
Apt. 11d 
We are in a town which does not DO above-ground pools. We bought one, it was on sale at Target at the end of the season! The kids love love love it. It’s very little trouble to keep it running, and we can throw it away when the youngest hits fifteen or so. I have seen their friends’ parents’ eyebrows arch, yes. And their kids love it…
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Not a good article for people who are snobby about getting to the point.
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1. I was also driving by a house last month with huge, overdone Christmas decorations and a small “For Sale By Owner” sign in the front, and wondered whether that was a good idea or not.
2. It may be snobbery when taken too far, but there is a lot of value in living with people who have the same sensibility as you. Or neighbors moved a couple of years ago, and the new family that moved in to our “old” neighborhood with 100 year old homes and old, tall trees promptly cut down all of the old trees and planted new saplings. They then started complaining about our old trees that were hanging over their property (we had an expert come out, declare the trees healthy and safe, and have since ignored them.) They have also been doing non-stop renovations, taking all of the “old” out of the house.
There are tons of new developments in the area with larger houses, bigger lots, and no old trees — some with comparable income demographics and school quality. These people would probably be much happier there. We’d be happier if they went there. Why did they move next to us?
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on the whole, I prefer bitchy or snarky to snobby. But, like the Slate commenters, I wonder if there is a regional difference.
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I wonder if this “snobbery” is related to your previous post on a lack of a community gathering place. For me, community means learning to live beside/with lots of different people. You put up with their eccentricities and they put up with yours because you know each other.
I am curious whether this “style or lack thereof” scapegoating is a way of trying to have community at a time when many if not most of us move a lot, don’t know our neighbours, etc. We can bond over “we love this type of tv show/coffee/couch and not those ones over there” much more easily than spending the years alongside each other really getting to know each other.
And yes, I too have been known to be snarky about such things…
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I am not a snob. I try hard to admire sincere passions of any sort (Sponge Bob included, even though *I* *hate*hate*hate* sponge bob or wine, even though I’m neutral about wine, or art, something I am passionate about).
I guess I’m a snob about insincere passions, people who put up either tasteful wreaths or sponge bob inflatables or a Frankenthaler on their wall not because *they* love them, but because they think their neighbors, friends or colleagues want them to. Does that make me a snob about snobs?
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I’m a total snob, though I do many of the things I’m snobby about on occasion (bowl, listen to country music, have a tattoo).
Bert and I used to have a joke about the lower the income, the bigger the TV. This was back in the 90’s before so many people had flat screens. My sister bought a huge tv back then and she remarked she was “one wolf-hybrid puppy and job loss away from truly falling from the middle class.” She’s totally fallen now. She has more than one tattoo AND listens to country music most of the time.
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In my neighborhood, there seems to be less effort defining your tribe and more effort asserting your status or whatever you want to call it when adults with grown children have a fight about parking that has been going on since the Clinton administration.
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“whatever you want to call … a fight about parking that has been going on since the Clinton administration”
Too much sobriety?
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Maybe. I wonder what is going to happen when the people my age get old enough to be at home most of the day. I would guess that one of my neighbors is going to turn into a full-on hoarder over the next twenty years. She lives alone, in a three bedroom house with a basement and a garage that is too full to use for either of her two cars (one of which is parked illegally every night).
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Maybe I am kind of a snob about people who have more cars than drivers when they don’t keep those cars on their own property.
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