From Dave Eggers' 2000 bestseller A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:
"Yes, but it's the way you'll tell her, the way you'll sort of shame her, mentioning that not only did your parents die of cancer, your father had lung cancer, but that you don't want the smoke around your little brother, blah blah, and it's the way you'll say it, you'll want to make this poor woman feel like a leper, particularly because she rolls her own cigarettes, which even I admit is kind of doubly sad, but see, you want her to feel like a pariah, like a lower form of life, because that's what, deep down, you feel she is, what you feel anyone tethered to any addiction is.
And now you feel that you have the moral authority to pass judgment on these people, that because of your recent experiences, you can expound on anything, you can play the conquering victim, a role that gives you power drawn from sympathy and disadvantage -- you can now play the dual role of product of privilege and disenfranchised Job. Because we get Social Security and live in a messy house with ants and holes in the floorboards you like to think of us as lower class, that now you know the struggles of the poor -- how dare you! -- but you like that stance, that underdog stance, because it increases your leverage with other people. You can shoot from behind bulletproof glass."
Tags: Eggers, AHWOSG
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