by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Lefties are neurotic sissies. Anarchists are smug hippies. Conservatives are greedy. Libertarians are pornmongers.

My negative notions of the political spectrum left me in a wasteland. Not knowing which team to cheer for left me in constant crisis mode at dinner parties. I'd ask to pass the wine whenever it was time to comment on the Mideast or farm subsidies.

What's a girl to do?

Luckily I grabbed an unlikely political lifeboat. I've found a point of view by becoming a petty bourgeois egalitarian. It's a creed so obscure it almost appears that I've invented it myself, although there have been echoes of it in every generation. I haven't written the manifesto yet, but it demands a fair chance for the little guy.

Here's the logic: unionized employees are protected by big labour, and big business looks after their management personnel quite handsomely, but nobody's watching out for the rest of the world - dépanneur owners, cab drivers, the kid pushing the mop at Burger King.

The embattled little guy is the underpaid, underecognized muscle of the system, the progenitor of steel-willed self-sacrifice and initiative and 16-hour work days, often earning annually what the Governor General spends on a week's dry cleaning.

My egalitarian political utopia is not one where everybody's equally miserable but one in which everybody feels that they've got a fair chance to succeed.

Sadly, in our current reality, a poor kid would have to bust his ass and still wouldn't be anywhere near where a rich kid starts off at.

It's a betrayal of the New World escape from Old Europe's class structures, but there's no pretending that Montrealers aren't born into a social class.

The lack of hope for a dignified life leads many to despair. Check out the alarming drop-out rates, the increasing romanticization of outlaw gangster cults or the preposterously high percentage of youth who vegetate into a marijuana-deep-brain-freeze.

It doesn't help that the one person many petty bourgeois could identify with, that populist mascot, cynical quip-making PM Jean "Da Little Guy" Chrétien, has been replaced by a humourless corporate amoeba.

Prioritizing opportunity for this clientele seems well down on anybody's agenda. Indeed, the government's strategy to favour proletarian emancipation doesn't go far beyond selling lotto tickets.

And the media infotainment smokescreen has sabotaged aspirations. I mean, it's sad that a kid got killed in Toronto, but it's not going to impact your life like a story about the amount of time it takes you to get to work every day. Reports about natural disasters might be interesting, but the unrecognized real news is that our tax system zaps low-income earners and that banks refuse commercial loans to the less-wealthy.

The lefties, self-proclaimed heroes of the less-well off, don't consider fostering social mobility as part of their mandate. I've heard more discussion about whether institutions should install separate transgender bathrooms than I have about helping the poor escape the crushing monotony of poverty.

Lefties will go on all day about Enron's connection to Condoleezza Rice, Colombian coffee growers and the Mideast question but when it comes to local questions, some of their darling policies actually hurt the poor. For example, some advocate the right of prostitutes to operate on sidewalks in front of the homes of working-class people, which has - of course - proved massively unpopular with the poor themselves. (You'll note that every local politician who has embraced that position has seen their career quickly levelled: Sammy Forcillo, Sam Boskey, Louise O'Sullivan-Boyne, etc.).

Sadly, I'm thinking that many are no longer buying into the system anymore or holding any hopes of conquering their degradation, or even dreaming of a world in which they can achieve and attain prosperity.

If you're a hustler with energy and ambition and hopes to escape the grinding dullness of deprivation, get a plan and hope to get lucky, because I'm not sure anybody's going to stand up for you except for a small number - indeed very, very small number - of us petty bourgeois egalitarians.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca