I confess to being a kind of contrarian. A room full of heads nodding in agreement over some proposition is a room I find stifling. I very much appreciate the joys of debate, if carried out with good humor and intellectual honesty. Consequently, I often find myself saying, "yes, but \u2026."

So let it be with "elitism," which is a fighting word both left and right. Nobody seems to have a good interpretation of this word. It's a catch-all pejorative. It's one of the few terms of abuse that roll roundly off the tongues of a Marxist professor and a Fox News commentator. Few people call themselves elitists; it's a term we almost always ascribe to others. Elitism is in the eye of the observers \— we seldom note the mote of elitism in our own.

Contrarian that I am, I want to rehabilitate the word and re-establish a proper respect for at least some elitist impulses, tastes and understandings. I believe that elitism, in its most positive aspect, reveals a powerful striving for truth and beauty.

The opposition to elitism comes from the fear of being disrespected by people who think they are better than we are. We compound the elitists' offense by imagining them to be very different from ourselves, scornful and insolent, not sharing our values. I heard Fred Barnes, editor of the Weekly Standard, asked a very pointed question in a television interview. "Well, elites would believe that," he replied. Here's a man who is wealthy, who cruises to Alaska connecting the rich with the politically powerful, and who apparently does not seem to realize that he is in an elite. Conservatives have become right-wing populists. The economic elite screams bitterly about the media elite. Resentment is a poisonous passion, worse on the soul than even hate.

We do not seem to have a problem with elitism in athletics. We know who the great athletes are, and we celebrate them in their prime and in their retirement. Hank Aaron, Roger Staubach and Lance Armstrong live in a world the rest of us can only experience in our imagination. Likewise, many of us could make a short list of those we regard as the greatest actors and actresses of all time. Millions of us gather by the television when the Academy Awards come out. If these actors and athletes are not elites, then what else are they? And is it not elitism to identify with them, to emulate them by cultivating strength and grace in whatever ways they may inspire us to do?

I fully realize this is a matter of taste, but I am drawn much more to high art than to folk art. I spent 10 years as an average bass in a very fine church choir, and I have sung Palestrina and Handel and Vaughan Williams, and all in all, I find this elitist music far superior to the electrified folk and soft rock melodies in so many churches today. The music is more complex, more challenging to produce, and its beauty has types of intellectual and aesthetic depth and nuances that other music \— other great music \— lacks.

Elitism can look upward or downward. When elitists look down, they are prone to scorn what they see, and this scorn is often self-serving and uncharitable. But when they look up, they measure themselves against the best, and they strive to encounter all those things in their lives that are true and good and beautiful. They want to dwell among the best. Such elitism is to be admired.

Frank Thomas Pool is a poet and English teacher working in Austin. He grew up on Maple Street in South Longview and graduated from Longview High School. E-mail: FrankT.Pool@gmail.com.