Eat the rich. The poor taste funny and smell terrible.

I got a great dose of the Great Unwashed this morning. An old co-worker of mine once said that the bus is great because every day it's like getting a free freakshow, and rare indeed has been the day where that has been more on display than it was this morning.

The bus that takes me to school each day has a Wal-Mart about halfway up its route. For the first half of the ride, then, every welfare collector, Methuselan senior citizen, and junkie in Reno packs onto that bus where they proceed to make a very obvious exercise in contrast between themselves and the college students who are left behind (often looking dazed) after the bus vomits the detritus of society out onto the sidewalk in front of Sam Walton's Prole Supply Emporium. Not only that, but they stink. They don't call 'em Great Unwashed for nothing, and when the bus's air conditioning isn't working quite right (like it wasn't this morning), the stench hangs in the air like a milder version of Bangladesh.

All of the above was fresh on my mind when I walked into Core Humanities 202 this morning and when the classroom discussion turned to Machiavelli's The Prince and specifically that tome's expression that a prince should not be concerned with the common people but with the extension of the state toward those who support it (read: the nobility), I couldn't help but think of all the 21st-century versions of 16th-century peasantry clogging up my morning commute. I probably came off somewhere to the right of Hermann Göring in my anti-populist ranting but I don't care---when the rubber meets the road I am very much into Machiavellian/Nietzschean social Darwinism, since that's what I'm working so hard to grant myself---a return to my burgher-class upbringing and social standards. I'll be damned if I'm to be beggared by some impoverished moron clawing at my wallet through the apparatus of the state. I'd sooner they starved.