Opening An Aristocratic Can of Worms

So tonight I was talking over Victorianism and the 1950s with one of my friends tonight (among my crew,  this is our version of sports). And something came up that I know too little to meaningfully comment about, but I find interesting.

The following is the skeleton of an idea I'm having trouble expressing, so bear with me:

Despite advances in cultural and social history, let's be frank, we know far more about the upper classes of the past than we do the lower classes. This can lead to either Marxist repressimism, or a pollyannish love of Gone With the Wind.  Let's take it as granted that we are not landholding aristocrats who love rural communities and hate the city. 

The classical historiographic/sociological move is to say that peasants with money and cities are bourgeoisie, in part since we live on the other side of a change in social structures and economic efficiencies (to wit, the Enlightenment and the Industrial revolutions) that profoundly wipes away rural landholding. But is that really right? What makes a society take on populist values en masse, rather than everyone taking on aristocratic values and being able to fulfill them? How would we tell the difference?

My strong belief is that we're the former, rather than the latter. But what does a shift between them mean, and how would we know? This is the sort of thing that's going to bother me for a while. 

Wherein This Blog Establishes An Official Preference

Tom Ricks (Hat tip to Abu Muqawama) has the real story behind the Surge; it all was decided over a bottle of wine:

On the long flight home to Washington in a C-17 military cargo jet, Gates, who declined to be interviewed for this article, disappeared into his mobile home in the plane's belly with Pace and a bottle of California cabernet sauvignon. A few days later, Odierno got the word: Gates wants you to have all five brigades.

While there's certainly nothing wrong with drinking California Cabs (at my former wine bar, I used to serve this vintage, which is really quite good), there are clearly superior options for the Official Drink of Counterinsurgents. And don't buy this whole nonsense that leading COIN blogs try to pass off about arrack; one whiff of my former Sri Lankan roommate's favorite bottle has convinced me that this must be either a dastardly in-joke, or an extended Tim Powers reference.*

No, the proper drink of the counterinsurgent is clearly gin. What more could hearken back to counterinsurgency's dusty and slightly disreputable British history** than the favored liquor of Churchill? And this legacy is still alive in the Middle East; the Jordanians to this day make amazing gin that compares to Hendrick's in quality, and Gordon's in price!*** Clearly, there was a knowledge diffusion effect.

* According to Tim Powers' detailed historigraphic backstory notes for Declare, T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and others used to take a shot of one half measure kerosene, one half measure arrack mixed together. I leave it to the reader to decide whether this was as a sort of initiation, or simply to cut the arrack's taste...

** About which more later, when I get around to cleaning up my senior essay enough to put it up on this blog.

*** Contrary to popular conception, working as a bartender tends to have the same effect as working in a chocolate factory; spending all day with the product tends to make it rather less appealing on one's off hours.