Sunday, September 21, 2008
The Case for Elitism?
America likes mutts
Via Allah, some guy described as “a noted provocateur” gives his case for “elitism” and why it isn’t a bad thing. Unfortunately, he proceeds to demonstrate his ignorance about the Values inherent in Christianity, the Values upon which this country was built and the realities of the world. “Elite” how, exactly, friend?
[One article, several pages - hence the multiple links]
What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain’s advisers. What doesn’t she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin’s ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.
I’ve always wondered how they know Palin is ignorant of these things, since *I* [at least] have never heard her discuss them in depth. And I think it’s fair to say I pay some attention.
But to say that Palin is guaranteed to be ignorant because she spent no time learning at the knee of Saul Alinsky and his disciples, but instead spent considerable time learning at the knee of the Bering Sea and Mother Nature demonstrates quite a lot about this fella’s ignorance of the world and how it really works. I fear he does not realize that the cerebral is not the concrete, the ideal is not the actual - much as the map is not the territory.
I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn’t: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. ...There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn’t ready for? He wouldn’t. Everything happens for a reason.
Now I’m about the farthest one can get from being a Christian scholar, but It is my impression that G-d gives folks jobs they aren’t ready for all the time. That’s kinda one of the points, iddn’t it? [Correct me if I’m wrong, please.] Isn’t this fella’s statement more like the ... oh, how shall I say it… ignorance of someone who hasn’t studied the faith he criticizes?
You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” “miraculous healings” and “the gift of tongues.” ... Palin’s spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of “the final generation,” engaged in “spiritual warfare” to purge the earth of “demonic strongholds.” Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria.
Isn’t this sorta like what these fulk usually refuse to believe about Achmedsdinnerjacket and his Merry Band of Mullahs?
The anti-religious screed continues, including “doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed, of the 21st century.” *eye roll* But that isn’t what caught my eye—it only made me wonder whether this fella is trying to turn the supposed racial charge in this election into a feud over whose religion is better - or more nutty.
Not useful ground to plow—dangerous and full of rocks. Exploding rocks.
Statements like, “You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy...” can be turned about into a discussion of “disavowal of middleclassness,” “Black Liberation Theology,” and the “Black Value System.”
Here’s the nugget that got me thinkin’...
Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions ..... And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.
This person has a very narrow definition of “educated” upon which, apparently, he bases his evaluation of “intelligent.” Does he really believe that Putin was Ivy League educated? Or that any of the Mad Mullahs or Middle East Princes share even one of the preconceptions on which he bases his world view?
...I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. ...
For starters, I think this elitism does not mean what you think it means. What you are seeing is Americans getting tired of those who tell us they are elite, who tell us they “know better, are smarter, are more educated” and who then turn around and create things like the Community Development Act and the Wall Street Welfare bailouts. Who cannot see through things like the patently silly and demonstrably incorrect anthropogenic global warming hypothesis and then proceed to restrict both market and personal freedom based on hype. Who tell us that “paying higher taxes is patriotic” and “community organizing” with no demonstrable positive accomplishments is more valid than the experience of Governorship of a large state with piles of demonstrated accomplishment—imperfect or not.
What it seems you are arguing in favor of is a return to all those things a few courageous rebels left the European continent to escape - the assumption based on birth or association that some are smarter and better than the rest. The whole point of this Greatest Experiment was to prove that the common man, the ordinary schlubb, is not only sufficiently competent to organize his own life but sufficiently competent to create his own nation which can stand shoulder to shoulder with those run by elites.
And I think America has proven that to be the case.
I do not think you will find Americans prepared for quiet acceptance of the inherent superiority and fitness to rule us of a few who are deemed elite based on association, form of education or happenstance of birth.
Yes, our political process is silly - yet that is one of its virtues. The hardscrabble street-fighter aspects demonstrate the maturity of the participants. Can you take a punch and keep on going? Will you fold and resort to thuggish tactics or revenge when confronted with facts that displease you or make you look the fool?
The world is not a safe place populated by majestically heroic and genteelly sophisticated world leaders - it is a human place populated with greed, avarice, pettiness, religious and personal insanity and all the other ills to which humans are heir. A person with preconceptions of a genteel diplomatic conversation being the key to world peace is as ill-equiped as a 12 year old girl who bursts into tears at the thought of any suffering anywhere anyhow. That’s why they used to call it “a man’s world”—what they meant is it’s a fierce world, a fighter’s world, and no one who cannot stand up to it’s fierce, violent, primal actualities with grace, maturity and a firm grounding in his own Values can possibly have a positive effect upon it.
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