Cleaning up the debate

I just read the Brooks (11/16/06) column 'The Heyday of Snobbery'. He is 'riffing' on the culture of elite putdown connecting the phenomenon of 'Borat' (which I haven't seen) to the writings of H.L. Mencken. While I think he is, as usual, being the 'thing' he's criticizing, he once again seems to have put into words a point I having been trying to make when, in his litany of snobbishness he points to 'blue America' snobbery as an effort to legitimize the putting down of the people who voted for GWB. I think he has revealed, even though it wasn't his purpose, the cheap destructiveness of this type of dialog. For all practical purposes putting down is indistinguishable from dehumanizing and that is not its most salient effect: putting down is also indistinguishable from writing off and that is the death of a solid progressive majority.
I personally think that we all need a 'private place' to shed emotion about the things in life that frustrate us, a place where 'off color' jokes are OK, where its OK to be mad at the people we disagree with, and this 'place' can be large like a radio audience or small like a group of friends or even just one other person. The problem comes from making this 'private' activity 'public', or justifying its expression in 'public' discourse. It's up to each of us to delineate where that boundary falls but that in no way relieves us of the responsibility of setting a boundary for ourselves and sticking to it.
One school of thought says that our truest self is our public self, that is the face that we show to the world. This is the side of ourselves that works against our self perceived flaws. Although this aspect of our selves is subject to all the nastiness of our own insecurities, I would argue that this is also the place where civility shows up and the place where civilization is created from.