Monthly Archives: June 2008

Anti-intellectualism in the U.S.

In this blog post, Julius Lester articulates something I’ve been thinking about recently. Lester says:

There are many who wonder if a black man can be elected president. That is not my fear. I wonder if someone who as intelligent as he is can be elected president.
Emphasis mine.

The United States is an anti-intellectual country these days. Where the prejudice against intellectuals comes from I don’t know; but I know it’s there. I have many quarrels with Obama (especially his repudiation of his liberal church), but I acknowledge that he is a politician who does not feel compelled to break things down into 30 second sound bites devoid of all nuance. He does not pander to the lowest common denominator. He is willing to be intelligent in public. An intellectual politician? — this is almost inbelievable.

Julius Lester believes that Obama will get elected “if the young vote in unprecedented numbers”; otherwise, older voters who “resent his intelligence” could keep him from getting elected. Certainly, the young adults I know are more open to nuance than older generations. Certainly, United States generation who are just a little bit older than I have been notable since the 1960s for letting rigid ideology trump intelligence (as is true of George W. Bush), or worse yet for having no deeply-felt idealism to guide their intelligence (as seemed true of Bill Clinton).

But, cynic that I am, I doubt that the anti-intellectual climate of the United States is moderating in the younger generations. But what do you think? Do you sense more toleration for intellectuals in your part of the United States these days — or less?

Spam attack

Another spate of comment spam has hit this blog. My spam filters are working, but they’re working too well — I just pulled a real comment out of the trash. So if you comment on a post and it doesn’t appear within 24 hours, send me email to let me know.

Dealing with the heat

On Saturday morning, it went from 55 degrees Fahrenheit at 6 a.m. to 85 at 2 p.m. High temperature yesterday was 90, today it was 95.

As always, Ted showed up first for choir practice tonight.

“Hot today,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “But what’s bad is that it went from fifty something to eighty something in a day.”

Talking about the heat was depressing, so we started talking about the economy. That got depressing, so we talked politics. That got depressing, so we talked about New Bedford. That got depressing, but by then there were enough people for us to start singing. The first really hot weather of the season always makes me depressed and crankier than usual. Good thing we had choir practice tonight, because the music made all that crankiness disappear.

Rise up singing at GA?…

My father and I were just talking about singing groups. His church has a monthly singing group that uses the book Rise Up Singing, and some of us from the choir at my church recently started our own monthly singing group here in New Bedford, which we’re calling Singing Out!

I asked Dad which songs his Rise Up Singing group likes to sing, and he gave me lots of good ideas for our New Bedford Rise Up Singing group. Then Dad had a question. Like me, he is going to the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly (GA), the annual denominational meeting, and he asked if anyone was going to do a Rise Up Singing session at the denominational meeting. Well, near as I can tell, there will be no such singing session at our denominational meeting — but there should be. Elsewhere, I’ve shown how Rise Up Singing could serve as a liberal religious hymnal — so why not sing from Rise Up Singing at GA?

If you’re going to GA this year, and have any interest in doing something like this, leave a note in the comments section. Maybe we can get find a time, and a space in the convention center, and do some singing at GA.

Anecdotes and one-liners

The Coalition Against Poverty and the Coalition for Social Justice held their annual awards dinner tonight. I was asked to do the invocation, and I stayed to see the awards, and to hear the keynote speaker, Rep. Barney Frank.

Frank was introduced by a singer-sognwriter named Bill Harley, who committed the usual sin of playing and singing way too loudly, but who did the unusual and (mercifully) only played three songs. In introducing Frank, Harley told a story about going to perform somewhere in Alabama. There he wound up talking to someone who, upon learning Harley was from Massachusetts, started berating him for being from the state that elected Ted Kennedy as senator. “Stop it,” said Harley, “Ted Kennedy is the only senator who stands up for the poor.” Great anecdote — not sure what it had to do with Barney Frank.

Barney Frank went on to give an extemporaneous talk, marked by his trademark wit and intelligence. Unfortunately, his talk didn’t really hold together, but he got off some good anecdotes and one-liners, of which I noted down three:

Frank, who is gay, mentioned that he has been accused by right wingers of pushing a “radical homosexual agenda.” But, he said, his main gay rights issues are to allow GLBTQ people to “join the military, get married, and hold down a job.” That’s not a radical agenda, he said, “that’s about as bourgeois as it gets.”

While saying he supported capitalism, he said that he supported capitalism with significant government regulation. He noted that poverty has increased during the Bush administration. Frank reminded us that the Republicans claimed that a “rising tide floats all boats,” i.e., that any improvement in the economy will help all persons. In reply to this he said, “Yes, a rising tide floats all boats, but some poor people don’t have boats, and they’re standing on tiptoes now, and the tide’s going to go over their heads.”

In a long meandering digression, he talked about the importance of community colleges and state universities, because these institutions give wide access to higher education. This led to a comment about nursing programs in Massachusetts state colleges — although there’s a desparate need for nurses, and although there are plenty of young people who want to become nurses, there aren’t enough slots in nursing programs to meet either demand. One local nursing college, according to Frank, has only 42 slots for nursing students, but demand is three times that. If we’d fund community colleges better, said Frank, we’d have more nurses, all of whom could easily find jobs. “These are good jobs,” said Frank. “They’re not going anywhere. You can’t outsource them because somebody can’t stick a needle in your ass from Mumbai.”

Not one of Franks’ better talks overall, but the witty bits were delightfully caustic.

More of Frank’s wit in this New York Slime profile.

Analysis

A couple of blocks up the hill from us, in the little park known as Wing’s Court, some people decided to have a Garden Night. The organizers included quite a few people from the Sustainable Southcoast group that’s been meeting, and so of course my partner Carol was involved.

The organizers got donations of five cubic yards of compost, some hay, and vegetable seedlings. They coordinated with the city, and got permission to replant a garden that had gotten overgrown with weeds and bushes. A couple of local builders assembled frames out of 1×6 rough boards for creating raised bed gardens, and anyone who showed up was invited to take home a raised-bed-frame, some compost to put in it, and some seedlings. There was way too much compost, so Mark (one of the organizers) got a bunch of us organized to spread it in a grassy area to fill in holes and hollows. Different people played different kinds of music, from singer-songwriters, to a bunch of us who led some participatory singing, to a couple of kids who sang a few songs they knew.

The event started at 5:00, and went until after dark. Maybe fifty or sixty people came and went in the course of the evening. It was a very mixed crowd — people of all ages from kids to 20-somethings to middle-aged folks to elders — there were whites and black and Cape Verdeans, Anglophones and Lusophones — a few upper class people and middle class people and working class people — a good mix of men and women. The diversity is partly a function of being in the city, where there is naturally more diversity.

Everyone had a blast.

So why was this event so successful? I stood around after dark talking with a few of the organizers about what made it successful, offering my ideas of what led to success. First of all, it was a participatory event, and you could choose how much you wanted to participate: you could just watch, you could hang out and talk with friends, you could take home a seedling or two, you could sweaty by helping shovel dirt around, you could toast marshmallows over a charcoal grill, you could sing, you could help create a community garden — and so parents could bring their kids and the kids wouldn’t be bored, us men (who are socially conditioned to prefer working and activity to relationship) had something to do, and no one was sitting passively waiting for something to happen (or waiting to get bored so they had an excuse to leave). Second, the organizers were of different races and ages, and they plugged into their networks and got their friends to come; in addition to which, the activities were not particularly racially delimited activities. Third, the people who live or work in the neighborhood knew that their work was going to improve a park that we all use regularly, we knew we were doing something that would have a real impact on our daily lives. Fourth, it was noisy and smelly (the hay smelled particularly good) so people walking by the park knew something interesting was going on.

That was my analysis of why this was such a successful event. The next question is, how do we make this happen again?…

Generation gap

I’ve been interested in the generational wars that we have seen in the presidential primaries. Hillary Clinton, like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is a product of the 1960s; culturally she is a Baby Boomer. Barack Obama, although demographically a member of the post-war “baby boom,” is a product of the 1970s and 1980s; culturally he is a Gen-Xer. A big part of Obama’s political strategy has been to cast Clinton as the out-of-touch Baby Boomer who doesn’t understand a post-racial, post-protest, post-New-Left, postmodern world.

I will be curious to see if Obama follows the same strategy with John McCain, who is not a Baby Boomer. McCain is a product of the late 1940s and 1950s; culturally, he is a member of the generation who dressed in gray flannel suits. I’d be tempted to call McCain a member of the Older Generation. How will Obama deal with the older generation? The Baby Boomer strategy of dealing with elders involved open warfare and ad hominem attacks. But I expect Obama to deal with McCain the same way he dealt with Jeremiah Wright: dismiss him as out of touch and out-dated, and be vaguely patronizing.

I’m willing to bet that other Gen-Xers will copy this strategy in their own lives. For example, in churches I expect that Gen-Xers will start being dismissive of the Baby Boomers who run most churches these days. I expect them to look pityingly at the Boomers, but not engage in direct conflict with the Boomer power structure. I expect them to start talking about what it might mean to be a post-racial church and a post-protest church. I expect all this will drive the Boomers crazy. Indeed, some of this is happening now.

The culture of presidential politics tends to have influence in the wider culture. When Bill Clinton insisted that fellatio wasn’t really sex, I was doing a lot of youth ministry, and I was very aware that more and more kids got involved in fellatio at a younger and younger age. With George W. Bush’s tendency to authoritarianism, I see many young people willing to accept a large degree of authoritarianism in their lives. So where else might the Obama/Gen-X trend play out?…

For example, if Barack Obama wins the presidential election in November — if he even runs a close race — what might that mean for the 2009 election for a new president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA)? Right now, we have two declared candidates, both of whom are Baby Boomers, and both of whom are pretty much indistinguishable. If a Gen-X candidate were to emerge in the next few months, I’d be willing to bet that s/he could easily win the UUA election. I can think of three or four possible Gen-Xers whom I would vote for. So if you happen to know a viable Gen-X candidate for UUA president, encourage him/her to make some connections at General Assembly….