Confession: I’m a wimpy woke coastal elite

February 3, 2025

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

As a long time liberal-minded person, it’s difficult admitting this, but from all I’ve heard and read, there seems to be living proof I’m one of the many wimpy woke coastal elites excoriated by the right wing in America, and especially by the MAGA crowd.

And the reason democrats got swept during the recent election.

We are now looked down upon as in full retreat, losers, crybabies, a desperate, lost scourge properly and honestly thrashed and rejected by a gloating America of winners.

I guess I never really looked in the mirror and thought of myself as America’s conception of woke. I mean, I don’t want to see men who have transitioned into women competing against women in sports, defunding the police is BS, and I’d jump into a foxhole with several old friends who voted for Trump, etc. etc.

But my guess is that almost anybody could size me up immediately as a wimpy woke coastal elite in my every day wardrobe of T-shirts and shorts, uneven beard and unkempt hair, all surely signs of academic, cosmopolitan elitism at its most extreme.

And then there’s my car, a 23-year-old Japanese import which has a duct taped on side mirror and rust spots verging on the need of more duct tape, all of which smacks of snooty and financially superior elitism.

True, I own nothing!

Then there is the fact that I dropped out of college after two years because I hated it, felt it was a vapid conveyor belt to some kind of middle class suburban ownership nightmare teeming with ex-fraternity boys and sorority girls growing fat and smug in—to me—a meaningless existence.

Becoming at this point increasingly elite and wimpy and super woke, I joined the army and was more than pleased I became a medic and didn’t have to carry a rifle. Talk about a wimp!

Then there is my history of living hand-to-mouth for decades as an occasional cab driver; but mostly a bartender in neighborhood pubs, a gambling casino, a steakhouse, a corporate hotel, and eight years in one of the most uncouth, rowdy and brawling fisherman’s dives on the elite west coast.

What an infuriating and revolting show of wimpy wokeness!

During my formative years, while hitch-hiking around the country with merely a backpack, I ended up employed on the last paddle wheel passenger steamship left on the Mississippi River (The Delta Queen), and found myself submerged in a warren of rooms in the hole as the only white person living among three generations of poor blacks, and was so stunned by their disadvantages of surviving in America that I actually wrote a book about it, “Life On the Mississippi, 1969.”

Surely such an endeavor reeks of wimpy woke elitism needing condemnation for espousing “critical race theory,” a subject that we certainly want to extinguish so little white school children of MAGA moms and dads don’t become guilty and depressed, poor things.

But the real tell tale sign I am a wimpy woke coastal elite is that I read!!! Yes I read, and not on my computer, not on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, and I do not listen to the TV news or political podcasts harboring crackpots and loons and conspiracy fabricators and scam artists and ignoramuses and hate mongers and haters and criminals.

The real and glaring revelation that I am a wimpy woke coastal elite is that I not only read a major metropolitan newspaper every morning—the despised, liberal LA Times—but also New Yorker magazine, and the Sunday New York Times, all bastions of extreme wimpy woke elitism that feature mostly Ivy League egghead so-called intellectual journalists and investigative reporters loathed by the big strong rough and ready MAGA heroes in America, and seen as possibly the deep state of Marxists and malcontents who have the gall to criticize America.

I am also surrounded by around 500 old dusty paperback books that I cherish as a personal library. I find some of these books so valuable that I return to them over and over for replenishment of my soul, for wisdom, for history, for knowledge, for inspiration, and for help in determining this country, and the world. I suppose such a culture reeks of elitism.

Also, on the side, I like to drink in bars and prefer straight vodka on a few cubes or a beer over delicate wines. Talk about precious woke!

Finally, on an end note, I have never owned a gun or rifle and find it repellent to shoot any kind of animal, certainly the wimpiest of all wimpy woke traits, and despised by the orange Messiah’s son, who poses with great pride in photos of himself next to slain big game—a real man.

And I suppose having a soft spot for humanity and animals and the planet goes against the Darwinist dog-eat-dog heroics of brutal capitalism, where compassion is mocked as weakness, and “woke.”

But here’s the deal, as a true wimpy woke coastal elitist, I’ll back up anything I have to say. And I suppose, from this point on, that makes me an enemy of the “real” people. So be it.