I can't decide. Is good taste or chronic rube-aphobia at the heart of the opposition to the Kansas City CowParade?
—Mike Hendricks, "How now on cows, Cowtown?," The Kansas Sity Star, July 19, 2000

Still, there is a real context for Mrs. Clinton's remarks that goes beyond Arkansas to one of the more pervasive, if little-discussed, maladies of American life: rube-aphobia.

The term, which was first bandied about in Texas in the 1980's, does not refer to fear of bumpkins and hicks, but the opposite: the fear that unless you have the approval of the media powers and taste makers in Washington, New York and to a lesser extent Los Angeles, you're treated like a bumpkin or a hick.
—Peter Applebome, "It's Not Called Arkansas for Nothing," The New York Times, August 16, 1998