Tag Archives: revolution

The Tinderbox Theory of the Republic

Leave a reply

Glenn Beck favored radio listeners today with excerpts from his email correspondence with Sarah Palin over the shootings in Tucson.

Both correspondents were naturally eager to distance themselves from Jared Loughner’s murderous rampage at the Safeway on Saturday, and say that they abhor violence. They come in peace. “Sarah, as you know, peace is always the answer,” Beck writes:

I know you are feeling the same heat, if not much more on this. I want you to know you have my support. But please look into protection for your family. An attempt on you could bring the republic down.[emphasis mine]

What’s most striking here is not the patently absurd notion that “an attempt” on Sarah Palin’s life would or “could bring the republic down”; it’s the very idea of the republic underlying it.

That is the idea of the republic as a tinderbox. Apparently the place is ready to explode at the slightest provocation. In Beck’s view, or self-serving conceit, most Americans are locked and loaded, ready for civil war. We are teetering on the brink of revolution. Don’t tread on us. In our distressed republic, good people have been pushed to the limit. We are ready to resist tyranny at every turn, or at least before every commercial break, and with every self-aggrandizing tweet.

And all it would take to ignite the tinderbox would be the assassination of… Sarah Palin?

Is this our Helen?

It’s unclear whether Palin thinks her face or her Facebook page could launch a thousand ships, but she shares with Beck the view that her obnoxious behavior and his are of historic importance: “Thanks to all you do,” she replies, sounding vaguely apostolic, “to send the message of truth and love and God as the answer.”

And yet even with good men like Beck out there our future is not secure: “our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence”. So peace is always the answer, or at least truth and love and God are the answer, unless, of course, the “politicos” keep picking on Sarah Palin.

And if they don’t stop? Then all bets are off, I suppose; and all patriots should fear for the republic.

What’s Eating American Intellectuals And, Now, What’s Eating Me

Leave a reply

In yesterday’s post about what’s troubling American intellectuals I arrived at what I considered a fairly uncontroversial point of view, namely, that the diminished social stature of the intellectual – and, in some quarters, the scorn and mockery of educated “elites” — indicates something disturbing about our attitudes toward education and where we are headed as a society.

Just what that something might be is up for grabs, but I was tending toward the dramatic and alarming view that this is the first stage of the eclipse of liberal arts education in America, the onset of a dark age. I tried to hint at that in the final paragraph of my post.

Not a single comment all day — until last night, when someone registered his strong disagreement on my Facebook page, and I had the sinking feeling that maybe everybody had strongly disagreed with what I wrote, but was just too polite to say so.

Michael commented that he “lost all faith in the ‘liberal intellectuals’ long ago,” and he goes on to say my post fails to register how badly intellectuals of all stripes have failed us, so they might just deserve our scorn.

…it was a bunch of Ivy Leaguers who got us into the damn mess we’re in–the latest version of “the best and the brightest.” Your intellectual aristocracy has failed us, Louis. They’ve screwed up the environment probably beyond redemption, they’ve brought us war without end, they’ve totally fucked up the global casino economy. This last half century of downhill slide wasn’t the consequence of bunch of climate-denying yahoos and creationist boobs; it was all the brilliant scientists at MIT, all those glorious minds at the Kennedy School of Government, all those experts at G’town International relations, all those Harvard Business School MBAs. Thanks a million, minds.

Just to be clear, I am not out to defend tenured Ivy League professors, the best and the brightest, or an intellectual aristocracy (if there is such a thing). They don’t need me to defend them. Nor am I trying to put them at ease. I am simply trying to understand why they are so ill at ease these days, and what that might mean.

If I widen the historical lens I begin to wonder whether a certain idea of the intellectual is passing from the American stage and maybe from the world stage. Technocrats and scientists still garner our respect and admiration (despite what Michael says about the folks at MIT and elsewhere), and we are still captive to a narrative of scientific and technical progress; but we may have lost our faith in the idea that we can ever learn anything of consequence about human affairs or the human condition. That’s not something I can lay out arguments to prove; it is simply something I wonder about, and it’s a possibility I dread.

On the other hand, I can’t really go where Michael is going with his comment, partly because I recognize the inherent fallibility of all intellectual undertaking — it’s no surprise that the best and the brightest would fail to deliver us from evil; nobody can — and because I admit that most human endeavor ends in pure folly, no matter how noble and inspired and smart it might at first seem.

That is no reason to give up on education or enlightenment. This is a point Russell Kirk made, snidely, but powerfully, in a passage quoted by Bainbridge:

Populism is a revolt against the Smart Guys. I am very ready to confess that the present Smart Guys, as represented by the dominant mentality of the Academy and of what the Bergers call the Knowledge Class today, are insufficiently endowed with right reason and moral imagination. But it would not be an improvement to supplant them by persons of thoroughgoing ignorance and incompetence.

To be sure, the current wave of populism will pass. My concern is that after the revolution, we’re going to have to start rebuilding, and it’s difficult to do that in darkness.

Ancient Honor Is Not Dead

Leave a reply

A old friend — we were best friends in high school, but since then we’ve drifted apart — emailed me last night to tell me he’d been laid off. He’d worked for the same company for twenty-three years.

He tells me the news in the passive voice: he was notified; his job was eliminated. This is perfectly appropriate, I suppose. A turn of events like this makes one feel deprived of all agency, a patient, not an agent, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, caught in the undertow, run aground or cast adrift as a huge economic wave breaks. Those twenty-three years, arguably the best years of a man’s life, don’t count for much these days; loyalty affords no blind, break or refuge.

My friend writes that he’s been soul searching; we’ve all been soul searching. The nation as whole is suffering from what one wag calls “free-floating economic anxiety.” It sounds very clever, but you have to wonder why anyone would want to be clever about all that’s happening around us. I suppose being witty is one way to keep your wits about you, especially if the alernative is to plug into the round the clock economic hysteria.

I was never a very good sleeper – maybe I’ve spent too much time searching the darker corners of my own soul to ever find my ease – and I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about that email from my friend, and what this layoff could mean for him and for his family, and what it might mean for me: the decisions I may have to face if things get worse, the decisions we all may have to face. I am not sure we are ready, or equipped, or willing to face them together. At four o’clock this morning, I was looking at news from the Nikkei.

Clarence Thomas in his remarks yesterday said we have grown self-indulgent and soft, ignorant of the constitution and used to feeling entitled to things our ancestors would have considered privileges. He’s probably right. Now I am all for asking what I can do for my country, but I am pretty sure I’m not ready for the prescription Justice Thomas wants to write to cure our social ills or strengthen our political will. Besides, our forebears were not necessarily cut from better cloth, as if the very genetic material from which Americans are made has degenerated and declined over the past fifty years of post-war prosperity. But it seems like bad form to argue the point.

Our grandparents and great-grandparents knew hardships — all their lives — we have never known. They didn’t feel entitled. And they didn’t hope for as much out of life. But loyalty counted more in those days, and – we’ve been told — a company man was a company man, until the day he got his gold watch and pension. Unless, of course, you weren’t a company man: in which case you just worked hard all your life and took what few pleasures came your way.

So the story goes. But I’m not sure how exactly that story illuminates our current situation. I am not even sure that we are very close to knowing the truth about our current situation. John Stewart excoriates Jim Cramer on national television and America chalks one up for the good guys; but Cramer and company were just along for the ride, singing for their supper, flattering the princes who hired them for jest. (And I couldn’t help but feel that Stewart came off as a scold playing for easy applause.)

It may be fun to hate the big, fat greedy cigar-chomping AIG executives who took the bonuses; but cartoons are not reality, and most of us would demand compensation we’d been promised and contracted for. No, it wasn’t right; no, it didn’t look right: but considering AIG currently still has 1.6 trillion in outstanding derivatives exposure, we need to clean up that mess and do that in an orderly fashion. Litigation over bonuses won’t help accomplish that. So maybe Ron Shelp’s piece in today’s Wall Street Journal has it right: “the bonuses stick in my craw,” writes Shelp, but the bonuses may be “justifiable… because the executives in the financial unit are trying to undo and wind down very difficult agreements. It is in everybody’s interest, AIG’s and the government’s, to get them cleaned up and to close down the unit.”

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is taking issue with that view now. But when Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa suggests the executives at AIG should all commit Seppuku, he’s not taking a stand for ancient honor; he’s just feeding populist rage, and he’s not helping anyone figure out the trouble we are in, the trouble we need to face.

Indeed, I wonder if all the theatrics around AIG and the catastrophic failures of the past six months or so aren’t doing more to obscure the problem we have than to illuminate it. There’s good reason to believe, isn’t there, that the “systemic” and structural problems we are facing now are not exactly new, but new and dreadful manifestations of problems kept from view by the housing bubble from 2003-2006 and by the Internet or dot.com bubble that burst in 2000.

In those days, we used to celebrate systemic and catastrophic structural change as “creative destruction”; the more mild-mannered among us would talk about the the emergence of a “new economy,” the shift from manufacturing to information services. Whole industries and supply chains would be “disintermediated”; once American industry had given up the ghost, or just moved offshore, the military industrial complex would evolve, yes, evolve into a new information economy.

Evolution, though, is brutal sport. I’ve noticed that it’s a word business-people like to use when they want to avoid the word revolution. But you don’t need Naomi Klein to know that capitalists are revolutionaries, and revel in catastrophe and the overturning of old orders. Some will emerge from the ashes triumphant. Others will not survive. It’s not really a question of who is made of better stuff. It’s a question of whether we can master the forces we ourselves have unleashed on the world, and turn them to our good.