less and more than a conspiracy

I wish I had been invited to Rob Stein's presentation on what Lewis Lapham has called "the organizational structure of the Republican Message machine. As Lapham writes in September's Harper's which is not (yet?) on line, "Having devoted several months to his research through the available documents, he was content to let the facts speak for themselves--fifty funding agencies of different dimensions and varying degrees of ideological fervor nominally philanthropic but zealous in their common hatred of the liberal enemy disbursing the collective sum of roughly $3 billion over a period of thirty years for the fabrication of 'irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.'"
Irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas - a brilliant formulation, attributed I'm assuming to Stein. Now if we take Stein's research seriously, the right wing has bought an entire class and generation of intellectuals and academics, funding the 'research' of eager to please scholars such as Milton Friedman and Dinesh D'Souza. The first defends the miraculous power of markets while the second condemns cultural and moral relativism.The loosely organized system of funders, ideologues and foundations have more recently started to fund the campus (see gadflyer. So if the Young Conservatives are suddenly looking good on your local campus, you'll know that they're energized by large infusions of good old cash.
Lapham ends his editorial on a dark note: the concerted effort to dumb down public discourse has worked as both presidential candidates campaign on values and virtue rather than ideas. But at least one of them appears to believe in reason. The bottom line in America is -- it is better to be "good" than to be capable of "critical thinking." Wendy Kaminer has described this as piety triumphing over dissent. But the Academic Left has certainly contributed to the pathetic state of public discourse. Jeff Wallen's criticism of how contemporary academic debate gave more importance on "where the speaker comes from" than  what the speaker says is most succinct; this leads to the most radically individualist ethos -- each individual defends the interests of his or her identity rather than the validity of his/her argument. I think things are changing because I think finally we are realizing that it is democracy and NOT identity that needs to be defended.  At a meeting I attended this past year, a speaker tried to say, "Well as a ...., this makes me feel..." and no one was buying it. It didn't silence discussion. We moved on.

broke

I'm doing some translation work for money and getting ready to move to Asia for the year so I am not blogging very much these days, but I had this thought for you all about my Minneapolis years. I'm sorting through my stay in the heartland and I remembered how oppressed I was by the ostentatious frugality of the good people of that state. The more money they had, the more they flaunted their penny-pinching ways. Each one of them was a wannabe Benjamin Franklin. They were keeping their Franklin close and their benjamins closer.

In Minneapolis I overheard some one giving a detailed inventory of how little money she had spent on vacation while on the checkout line of the yuppie grocery store. "And then we found this incredible hotel overlooking the Mediterranean for $15.00 a night. I told the owner that she had to include breakfast and she agreed! I spent two hundred dollars in two weeks!" Skinflint.

Here in New York, we are way more into the ghetto gold. Those anxious women at suburban train stations are clutching their LV spring collection bags as if their lives depended on it. They vacation at "Sandals" in Jamaica. The faces here bear the anxious mark of the shtetl, the overcrowded steamer leaving Naples harbor seventy years ago, the fetid Lower East Side, teeming Flushing, Queens, the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. They look nothing like the good people of Minnesota.