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October 10, 2008
Hey Smart People, Go Away and F*** Off
David Brooks is one of the few conservative columnists I can read with any frequency--probably because he's not so much of an idiot that he can't see what's wrong with his party. Here's the final paragraph from his most recent column, discussing Sarah Palin and the class wars conservative foment:
Politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
I think his statement that in conservative thought, "The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts" squares well with the analysis I offered earlier, of why Republicanism is to politics as punk is to music: you have regular joes who just love rock & roll making music in their garages--or you have oversophisticated, overeducated, overambitious guys who (gasp!) learned their craft at a university or conservatory and make music that actually exploits what they learned from other experts. Eek! Oh no!
This isn't to say that I don't think music--or literature, or visual art, or anything--can't become too obscure and self-involved. There's plenty of poetry I can't stand, because it's technically ambitious and weird, but has nothing to SAY. But I believe that a critical engagement with the ideas that have shaped our world, and a careful reading of what others have had to say, helps writers have something to say and say it in a way worth paying to.
I believe that art, like politics, is a conversation. And the best way you participate in that conversation is by trying to respond thoughtfully and articulately to what's been said before--and knowing what's been said before requires an education. That education can be conducted on one's own--certainly there are great autodidactics in the world, one being my good friend Saviour Onassis. (Hey, SO!)
A movement that disdains education will be devoted to a xenophobic desire to destroy what is foreign or difficult to understand, and it will trade on the familiar, even as it objects to anyone further down the social ladder appropriating for its own ends the goals, rhetoric and tools of the familiar. I believe, for instance, that the current attacks on Obama involving claims that "people don't know who he is" and "his name says it all", coupled with assertions that he's a terrorist--I mean, a black man with a weird name and foreign ancestry is running for president!--are akin to punk's horror of rap and hip hop, its outrage that people who were too poor even to buy a guitar or an amp and so went from three chords to zero chords, still managed to make music other people would want to hear.
Brooks takes a starker stance than I took. I wrote that both Republicans and punks "decry anything 'elite,' both privilege raw emotion and anger over intelligence and expertise--not that they have no use for intelligence or expertise; they're just not as important as being pissed off." Whereas Brooks writes that within conservatism, "a disdain for liberal intellectuals [has] slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole."
I don't think the Republican party has much that is thoughtful or articulate to say these days. And I think defenses of the relevance of both punk and conservatism need to be reconsidered in light of political actualities. Because another similarity I see between punk and the GOP is that even their defenders acknowledge that there is something worryingly stupid in both.
Let's defend the intelligent and well-informed, OK? Please?
Posted by holly at October 10, 2008 10:40 AM
Holly,
I think basically I am a conservative. Only what I want to conserve and what the "conservatives" want to conserve are worlds apart. I'm not interested in conserving transnationals. I'm not interested in conserving a religious-like materialism where people are imbued with a desire to always be buying so that the economy will continually grow. I certainly don't wish to conserve anything implicated by the obscene chant, "drill, baby, drill." I do wish to conserve family farms and family businesses. I do wish to conserve a healthy relationship with earth.
Parker
Hi Parker--
I like to think that I am dedicated to preserving things that matter, and if there were a preservative party, and the name didn't sound silly, I might join it. I hate waste--of natural resources, of time, of money, of things that still have a useful life--and I hate the carelessness or malice that often prompts waste. And I guess that's why I'd rather call myself liberal, even than progressive: I think we've made a myth out of progress, always trying to make things better, and that leads to waste. Whereas I do think that generosity, openness, tolerance, are signs not of carelessness, but care, and that is something that battles waste.
Not that any of these names really make a difference if the underlying principles aren't sound, and more and more, I think what matters in politics is that policies are in place to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone, as equitably and justly as possible.