Games people play
Scott McLeemee at Crooked Timber takes note of a Wonkette post about Late Night Shots, a Georgetown “social” club apparently similar in intent to our own much-lamented Lincoln Park Trixie Society. The backlash within LNS against an unflattering article in a local alt-weekly is revealing:
[W]hat we have here is the opposite of the “theft of enjoyment”. It is the fear, rather, that one’s claim to have access to superior power and pleasure won’t be acknowledged at all.
The point of a club like Late Night Shots is, in large part, to keep other people out of it. That’s obvious. But those other people have to (be imagined to) want in.
The greatest terror is not that they will try to overthrow you—or even that they might somehow break through the barriers of exclusivity. It’s that the outsider might laugh at the exclusivity.
Even those in the ruling class suffer from class anxiety, as it were; the status-game lead that they’ve worked so hard to achieve has been exposed as a sham. So, of course, they reiterate their successes and ridicule the status games that others (namely, alt-weekly writers/readers, aka “hipsters”) play. The hipster vs. yuppie cycle of sniping perpetuates itself again.
