This Guy's A Professor?

In an air-clearing posting on the elitism of the anti-elitists, Matt Welch picks up on a particularly egregious pronouncement by the particularly egregious Professor Bainbridge. I can't add a lot to what Matt said by way of noting Bainbridge's rank hypocrisy:

Professor Bainbridge, who was born in the Blue State of Pennsylvania, did his undergraduate work in the Blue State of Maryland, taught for a year at the Blue State valhalla of Harvard, and has been faculty in the shadow of Bel-Air since 1997.

It does seem to me, however, that Bainbridge has earned a special distinction in making use of this locution:

If you need evidence of the loathing in which liberal elites hold those of us who live in Middle America (whether in body or, as in my case, in spirit), you could do worse than Eric Alterman's hate-filled post-election screed [emphasis mine].

I'm not too interested in Alterman's remarks (though it's worth noting that they merely express the frustration many of us feel about Bush's support failing to decline in light of his administration's spectrum of failures), but rather in Bainbridge's idiotic claim to live in "Middle America" in spirit. It's not just that he sounds like Alan Keyes claiming Illinois as his spiritual home, or that, as Matt points out, his formative experiences were grounded almost exclusively in Blue America, such that (I suspect) the Red America he longs for is nothing but an empty template onto which he can project the negations of everything he detests about the society around him. The referent of Bainbridge's "Middle America" is most definitely not Middle America---as if there were such a thing, as if the Atlantic coast of Georgia and the mountains of Colorado are all part of the same cultural milieu.

In a perfect world, people who claim to live anywhere "in spirit" would be flogged in body. People who claimed to live in "Middle America" in spirit would be forcibly converted to a Mennonite denomination. But since our world is the worst of all possible worlds, the best I can do is institute a prize in Professor Bainbridge's honor, to be called the Bainbridge Pseudo-Populism Award, which will be handed out at my discretion to triumphalist, self-serving, half-truthful adumbrations of the national mood on the part of conservative intellectuals, especially the tenured coastal variety.

Elitist Blue-Stater that I am, I do tend to hold a certain degree of default respect for individuals who can justifiably put the title "professor" in front of their names. However, given the head-burrowed-deeply-up-his-own-ass effluvia of Professor Bainbridge, and my adventures with the dependably mendacious Professor Reynolds, I'm beginning to wonder if there's an alternate track to securing law professorships, namely winning them in Christmas raffles.