| Politics, populism, and pasta, oh my! |
[05 September 2008|01:13pm] |
There isn't actually any spaghetti in this entry; I just like alliteration a whole lot.
Somehow we -- on the national scale -- have gotten caught up in a national narrative that makes no sense. Our reigning story is about small-town, middle-of-the-country America. The narrative is about an America with beer and hunting and farms and Manifest Destiny.
That's cool. That's definitely part of America, and given that we all need to eat, I'm going to say that the farming and agricultural areas of America are really really important.
They are also lowest in population. The density in this country is higher on the coastlines, from Seattle to San Diego and from Boston all the way down, around, and in to Texas on the Gulf. [edit] (Now with cool-looking census information!) [/edit]
So why don't those other stories matter, anymore?
It is hard to take the story of a poor single mother, scraping by as best she can in Harlem, and call it fundamentally different than the story of a poor single mother, scraping by as best she can in rural Nebraska. Yet these stories are treated and perceived as fundamentally different, in the modern narrative. (Of course, there's also the fact that in one of those stories, there is likely to be brown skin and/or a non-English language spoken at home; we won't go down that road just now.) In the story, most particularly told right now by the Republican Party, of Us and Other, the "other" is in fact the majority of the population -- being marginalized out of the story.
Pretty cool how a founding myth works, huh?
I cannot say in words how much I hate this concept that higher education is not to be a goal, or that we should denounce intellectualism. We most certainly should denounce needless snobbery (anyone out there remember when I had some serious fights with my department chair in grad school, when he told me how I should change my tastes and my friends because they weren't "elite enough?"). But small thinking just isn't getting us anywhere. Strong, positive education really is the key to fixing almost every other problem we have, slowly and over time.
I'm sort of getting off track with where I meant to go, but mostly the gist is: I'm sad. This column and this blog post both articulate the point that's so horrible: we seem, culturally, to have lost the narrative of good schooling and hard work and replaced it with something more like this.
And when you get right down to it? I do not want my doctors, my air traffic controllers, or my United States presidents (or for that matter, my senators) to be "average Americans." I want them to be fucking brilliant. I want them to be so far ahead of me intellectually that they can just pull shit out of the air, like Stephen Hawking, and I'll know they did it right. I do not want them to be like me! I make mistakes every day. I forget a project, bunge a deadline, switch an e-mail, break a heel -- whatever. We all do. Some days are great, some are terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad days, and most fall in between for those of us who live and work in the world of Average.
And I'm pretty damn smart, if I do say so myself, and have sheets of paper with fancy seals proving how educated I am.
I don't want the leader of my country to be someone who's going to keep hitting snooze until finally the cat sits on his face. I don't want the leader of my country to be someone who thinks "Vermont" is a dirty word. I don't want the leader of my country to be someone who can't think beyond the boundaries of his own house, his own church, or his own state of origin. I definitely don't want him to be someone who attended his 8:00 a.m. graduate school classes but fell asleep in the back (guilty as charged) or who would write a Master's thesis in 56 hours, right before the deadline, instead of doing it properly (er, me again).
There are so many good reasons why 300 million of us aren't running for President. So why do so many of us want one of "us" to win?
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