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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: Uh oh. Politics. Run, Billy, run! "Doc Ock illustration" "gynocracy" "what's green and goes 200 miles an hour?" "She-Hulk naked" "mail order hookers" "history of rap" "Rachel pee stories" "wealth of McIlhenney" |
08.23.2004
In a presidential election, the intelligence of various parts of the electorate always comes into question. The American intellect, hardly a priority much of the rest of the time, is a much-talked-about topic every fourth November. It usually takes the unsurprising form of an us-vs.-them scenario: "they" (whoever they are) think that "you" (meaning the voter) are stupid, while, conversely, "they" think "they" are so smart. The brilliant Tom Frank, in his latest book What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, does an excellent job of detailing the way that right-wing Republicans have seized this issue; as usual, conservatives are much more skillful than progressives at seizing the hearts of the average voter while simultaneously picking their pockets. Specifically, today's G.O.P. has been remarkably skillful at convincing the middle and working classes -- in other words, the people who have been damaged the most by the Republican's determination to remove all the constraints on the capital of the nation's richest five per cent -- that they are being manipulated, lied to, screwed, blued and tattooed by an arrogant elite. Which, of course, is exactly the case; but in the fairy tales of the modern-day G.O.P., the elites are not the ones who are actually doing the screwing, the ones that consist of cunning, rapacious, and utterly asocial business leaders, crony capitalists, and megamillionares. Instead, the phantom elites consist of a shadowy, unnameable aggregation of college professors, pointy-headed intellectuals, and liberal millionaires lurking in their coastal lofts like bin-Laden in his Afghani cave. The anti-intellectualism of the right is a curious thing; it tries to have it both ways. While constantly reinforcing the notion that the sainted common man of the vast and pure red states is being continually assailed by Satanic eggheads in laser-beam-equipped ivory towers, they must also fill the smartness void left behind by demonizing all the actual smart people. After all, they aren't quite faux-populist enough to claim that idiocy (or "simplicity", as it's usually called) is a virtue. The wealthiest, most free, most technically advanced nation in the history of the world didn't get that way by being dumb. So they invert the model: the intellectuals, the scientists, the double-domes who think they're so smart -- they're really the dumb ones. You, the common man, the everyday Joe in those vast rural swaths of red, you're the smart one. And, as far as it goes, they're right. The common man in America isn't stupid. What we often call intelligence is often just specialized knowledge. There's absolutely nothing wrong with reaffirming the brightness, perception and common sense of the average voter. It's the people that the right chooses to demonize that makes it such an odd argument. The Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress, almost to a man multimillionaire lawyers, doctors and businessmen, waste an awful lot of breath denouncing multimillionaire lawyers, doctors and businessmen. The people who write the laws and hold the highest offices accuse college professors and limousine liberals of running the country, and the same people who own the media conglomerates and profit off them in the billions blame the state of the nation on the media. George W. Bush (a megamillionare who attended Harvard and Yale) mocks John Kerry for his megamillions and Ivy League "elitism", just as George H.W. Bush (a megamillionaire who attended Yale) mocked Michael Dukakis for a "foreign policy born in Harvard Yard". A man whose father was president and who never held a real job paints himself as a political outsider who will save the government from its entrenched army of arrogant insiders, while himself being funded by the biggest and wealthiest political machine the country has ever seen. Beyond that, it's extremely strange to hear the G.O.P. champion the intelligence and acumen of the average American. Why? Because more than anything, today's Republican party absolutely depends on the ignorance of the voter. In order to continue their dominance of the political landscape, Bush and his neoconservative cronies must make sure that the voter stay as ill-informed, confused and distracted as possible. It is not for nothing that the roots of the 20th-century Republican Party bear a strong resemblance to the nativist Know-Nothings of the mid-19th century, the faux-populist, xenophobic rabblerousers whose partisans proudly exclaimed "I know nothing". They don't know, they don't want to know, and they don't want you to know either. They don't want you to know that the people who really run the country are businessmen, not college professors. They don't want you to know what a disaster their foreign policy has been. They don't want you to know that they're lying, manipulating, and concealing the truth. They don't want you know about their plans to distract you with meaningless social hot-buttons while they push forward their terrifying economic agenda. For that matter, they certainly don't want you to know anything about economics, because if you did, you might notice that the party that claims to champion the working man against the pinheaded elites are in fact systematically gorging themselves while presiding over an unprecedented rape of anyone making less that half a million dollars a year. They have an absolute interest in keeping you dumb, while telling you how smart you are. The closer we get to the election, the more the culture war will heat up. And the more that happens, the more you'll hear from the bluebloods in populist clothing who make up today's G.O.P. that those wicked elites think you're an idiot, when, in fact, you're the smart one. And they're right -- if you're working-class or in the middle, you're not stupid. They're just hoping you're stupid enough not to ask the most important question of all: who's the real elite here? |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves." (E.M. Forster) |