Pen-Elayne on the Web

Political Goo-Goo

Well, I promised Anne Zook (link on sidebar) I'd do a follow-up to my comments last month about anti-intellectualism, because she's been talking about it on her blog. What prompted all this was Anne's link to Justin Cartwright's somewhat paternalistic article, Rise of the new infantilism, in the Guardian. [Guess Cartwright's too intellectual to start his header with a definite article; maybe there's more than one Rise.] I suspected I was in trouble when the first paragraph contained stuff like "I stopped at a diner for breakfast, where everyone was eating generous combinations of kiddies' food: pancakes with syrup, eggs over easy or sunny side up..." Now okay, 12-packs of Pop-Tarts are kiddies' food, I'll admit that. But pancakes? Eggs? Has this Brit, like, never heard of farms? I mean, what the fuck is wrong with eggs?

Well, we see it's not just eggs, it's what they represent. Rotundness, you see. "The puzzle... is why the popular mood has changed so radically from one of cautious self-restraint to a religious zeal for gratification. The demonstrable result of this change is the extraordinary number of obese people who lumber around our streets and presumably even more who stay at home because they can't lumber at all." A-ha! It's the fat people! How dare they leave their houses to "lumber around" - or, as less intellectual people might say, go for a walk and, you know, get some exercise?

Oops, I'm sorry. Fat people don't exercise, do we? (Only walked a mile today, fat and lazy scum that I am!) And there's obviously no correlation between obesity and environment, is there?, so we shouldn't even consider investigating the chemicals and preservatives that go into our bodies. After all, goes the wisdom, fat is caused by overeating, period. And no thin people overeat, and all fat people do (as my skinny friend Jan and I used to note when we would order the exact same lunch.)

Cartwright goes on to assure us "But over-eating is in a sense only the obvious and visible sign of a fall from grace, a sort of perversion of the sacraments." Because, again, in the World According to Justin overeating and obesity are the same thing. And the rest of his article is all about our love of instant self-gratification and quick fixes and pretty much what I was saying last week when I noted that "the reality of modern America tends towards multiple-choice questions rather than thought-out essays." But any points he tries to weave together were lost for me the minute I read his snobbish fatphobia, which had very little to do with anything else he said (despite his poor attempt at a segue) and just seemed to exist so he could trumpet his superiority.

Look, I grew up being an educational snob, I remember what it's like. It's a sort of infantilism in and of itself, isn't it? It's a little security blanket you can pull over yourself to feel better about being a smart freak or geek when the bullies make fun of you. But see, I grew out of that (well, mostly) and ventured into the real world and met people of all kinds of backgrounds, good people and bad people, and it's just not always as cut-and-dried as "look at all the stupid people being duped in our country." Equating stupidity with gullibility is as faulty as equating being fat with overeating. There's undoubtedly overlap, but a lot of smart people are easily duped, and a lot of stupid people have more common sense than many ivory tower intellectuals.

Okay, now please read Anne's essay linked to above. First off, she writes, "My reference to the (I think, very real) 'cult of anti-intellectualism' was, specifically, to the Republican Party's long history of dismissing the Democrats as, 'intellectually effete' as though the two were synonymous and bad. Intellectualism in this country is also linked (usually by the Right) to ineptitude. The clear inference is that to be intellectual is to be an incompetent wimp. It's as though you can either think or act, but you can't be good at both." Well, consider a minute. Who was President before Bush? A friggin' Rhodes scholar. Of course the idea of "smart people aren't to be trusted" is going to be one of the weapons in the Repubs' continuing anti-Clinton arsenal, particularly given the very real incompetence and obvious lack of smarts (both of book learning and common sense) of the current President. But look at Cheney, at Rove - heck, at Grover Norquist, one of the smartest intellectuals I've seen in recent months. It's the same-old projection pre-emptive strike at work - accuse your opponent of something you know you're doing before he can accuse you. Witness how Bush has begun repeating the meme "revisionist history" in attempts to throw people off the trail of his own administration's constant revisionism. This "I'm rubber, you're glue" tactic is infantilism at its worst.

Anne asks, "When did the unspoken agreement come into place that what we want are politicians we'd like to have a beer with and discuss the All Star Game, instead of politicians with the education and smarts to understand incredibly complex issues?" Well, aside from the fact that most of the American public did not vote for this man ("millions of voters" weren't "turned off" to the perceived-boring, competent, smart Gore; but the equally smart and better-connected cabal pulled strings in a Bush-run state and the Supreme Court intellectuals sealed the deal), I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting our elected representatives to be nice people. I'd far rather have a diplomat with an every-man attitude in office than the boob currently alienating over half the countries in the world with his misguided policies. In my book, acting polite and civilized is certainly preferable to adopting a smirking fratboy attitude.

I think Anne's main point might be "So, we need elected officials we can trust to be smart enough to have investigated ramifications and potential outcomes of the steps they take," but I don't consider this an issue of thought as much as one of forethought. And very few politicians, businesses, or anyone else in power appears to want to operate with anything approaching deliberation and forethought. Heck with the seventh generation, most people today don't look beyond the current quarterly report. And the need for this immediate self-gratification, the future be damned, is endemic to most people in power, no matter what their political affiliation. But doing stupid things, like being short-sighted, is not the same as being stupid.