Well, sorta. Now that the postmortems are nearing completion on yesterday’s fun in the primary election sun, here’s a little something to make your day.
Raving anti-intellectualism is the linchpin of Fox News’ reporting, to be sure, but this is amazing. Watch through to the end–it’s worth waiting for.
And now for your depressing moment of zen….
As society grapples with its fulminating identity crisis, the one that generates passionate pablum (yes, I know) like, “We need better schools! Education is important! Give us charters! Give us choice! Charters be damned, fund our public schools!” we are also watching and validating, by the millions, television that features people like Gretchen Carlson and other anencephalic torsos who seriously broadcast a polling result that offers 59, 36, and 26 percent.
Gretchen Carlson’s intellectual prostitution is merely symptomatic of a larger national malaise that I fear is deep-seated and intractable. I could write an extended, angst-filled rant on the increasing fashionability of ignorance, intellectual incuriosity, and disdain for all things academic, but that would only make me angry and spoil what is inarguably a rather nice snow day. I wonder if we’ll have school tomorrow?
This was great. Thanks. Wanted a great relief for a cold, wet, crappy day. This was it.
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p>One of these days the Fox News audience is going to figure out that they are being played for ignorant fools. By a foreign guy named Rupert.
It’s all very postmodern: shrewd and educated hucksters/poseurs play dumb to validate the masses’ insecurities about being “dumb” and uneducated, while simultaneously trashing the academic institutions and intelligentsia that facilitated their insight into the ease with which uneducated “dumb” people are manipulated.
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p>Elegant, actually.
and sad. It was particularly disturbing how stupid Gretchen had to dumb herself down so as to think she could pull of hosting the Fox News morning show, given how very bright she appeared to be on paper. That said, maybe years worth of trying to act stupid actually made her fit the part.
Claiming she didn’t know what “ignoramus” meant or what a “czar” is seems pretty over the top. But she’s laughing all the way to the bank. Stanford should request its diploma back.
What a great clip.
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p>I am the very proud father of a gifted soon-to-be 14-year old daughter who gets far too many messages that she is “too smart” for this “liberated” society we live in. I pray that we can still create a society where our daughters will not have to dumb themselves down in order “take it to the bank.”
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p>I will be sure that my daughter sees this.
in reality, both locally and nationally, it’s the boys who are succumbing to the anti-intellectual allure. In most high schools, the majority of high-achieving students are girls, not boys. So while your daughter may perceive some bias now, statistically, at any rate, that is likely to change as she exits high school. The trick now is to save the boys from themselves, certainly not the girls, who are faring quite well both in high school and in college.
My youngest son (about to be 16) seems to be under the delusion that blowing off his schoolwork empowers him. Fortunately his friends are all honor-roll students, so he still has some peer-pressure to do well. He lives with his mom and step-father on the North Shore, in a home that values sports over everything else and ridicules any conversation about academics, politics, or religion as “too controversial” and “too hard.”
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p>It was in that context that I was so glad he could be present when Mike Dukakis endorsed Mike Capuano. It was my son’s first live first-hand encounter with real-life politics, and he really loved it. I hope that I can keep my son connected with similar events.
I’m teaching a course next year in English for boys only. (I’m the queen of the boys in my school, believe it or not.) The pilot course is designed to get at what’s cooking in boys’ minds vis a vis their experiences in our district, being male in our school, male in society, etc. From there we hope to glean some information that will help us in understanding why our boys are underachieving. I’m particularly interested in their formative middle school experience and how/why they have the attitudes they do. The boys get to choose the literature (with specific criteria) and there will be no girls at all–just me. I’m psyched as this issue is near and dear to my heart, and I’m hopeful what we discover will enable the younger boys to have a better experience as they age.
My son, now 24, is a bright young man, but he would deliberately “dumb down” his language to match his peers, intentionally using grammar that he knew to be incorrect. He would tell me that he could “turn it on and off” at will. He scorned my comments that people judge him by how he dresses and how he speaks. He felt that anyone who judges someone on superficial qualities was not of interest to him. Inconsistent? Yes.
..in a Christmas Carol:
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p>Dickens also foretold the JohnD’s of the world, but the issues go hand in hand:
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I never read those lines in quite that manner. Interesting. Thanks for that! I’m going to go look the whole thing up now. My son is reading this now in his 7th grade English class. He is already feeling some of the anti-intellectualism of his peers who are not as bright. He has enough “smart” people around him, though, that I’m hopeful we can buoy him through this period. He has goals (to the extent a 7th grader has long-term goals) and he has always been able to understand how his education informs his options in the future. Again, thanks. I so much enjoy your commentary here.
blush.
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p>A friend is in the Stoneham Theater’s production of a Christmas Carol. Their version is really close to the original text (they have a Greek Chorus reading the expository bits). This part really resonated.
I have teenage daughters, too. We’ve been fortunate that they have several successful (at-home and in the job market) female role models in the family. We’ve balanced that with an at-home dad with a snarky, blunt, Detroit factory rat attitude. They’ve learned that being intelligent and articulate is important in life; and some times one finger says all that needs to be said.
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p>I think there is more here than gender. There has always been a deep – sometimes dark – strain of anger at the snobby, rich, college educated, elitist, Easterners/Northerners in the south and midwest. That’s what populism was all about 100 years ago. Fox knows that.
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p>There is also a general dumbing down, be like everyone else, meme running rampant through our culture that has nothing to do with gender. We’ve corporatized and Disneyfied ourselves. TD Garden?!?!?!?!??!?! What the Hell’s a TD? Touchdown? Please Pag’s, buy back the damn naming rights!.
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p>Sorry, lost it there for a minute…
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p>Everybody uses Windows because, well, everyone uses Windows. Our cars all look alike. Our movies are remakes, ripoffs, and sequels. Our radio stations all work off the same playlists. Faneuil Hall could be any shopping center – what’s “bostony” about The Gap or Victoria Secret?
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p>Success breeds imitation, not innovation. Appealing to the lowest common denominator works. It doesn’t pay to be different. Fox knows this, too.
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p>That Rupert the Immigrant guy knows how to make money pandering to the lowest common angry denominator. If he can find some woman to play the dumb blond, all the better.
Fanueil Hall used to be cool, now it’s just a cold mall with an awesome food court. As for TD, it stands for “Toronto Dominion”, and it owns some of the worst customer-“service” experiences of my life.
Or do I have the wrong bank? There’s an old joke about bulls and service, but this is a family blog.
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p>I knew what TD stood for. At least when they still used the Banknorth it made some sense. “TD” is just plain dumb. Branding doesn’t seem to attract the best and brightest.
Stewart is a national treasure.(let’s credit his writers and staff, too)
problem than Gretchen Carlson or Fox News. One aspect is the exaggerated dumbed down populism style that a lot of the right has adopted. In my own family I have a couple educated cousins (MD and an electrical engineer) whose emails have started to sound like Granny Clampett freaking about the Govmint Revinooers.
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p>I see intellectual malaise in some friends kids (late 20’s early 30’s) that they just dont want to know too much outside of their work or hobbies. I dont find that attitude at all disturbing. I do find disturbing the lack of opportunity for someone to thrive by putting in a day’s work at labor or a craft.
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p>I think these 2 kinds of willful ignorance meet sometimes when the contrived ignorance speaks to the frustrations of the understandable malaise of people that want a simple life.
but that concept is larger than the obsolete left/right political theater destined to die along with the former US.
When you have an escapee of the Bush Administration outright telling us globalists want to depopulate the world just to maintain their place at the top of the food chain somehow that doesn’t induce me to recycle for the future.
http://solari.com/blog/?p=3532