Here.
Happy Yom Kippur, everyone. While the rest of the campus is sleeping of their hangovers, I've been up and about having lessons, meetings, more lessons and more meeting. It's almost like I do have classes today. but enough whining. Let's begin.
Neologism of the day number one: Southernization. The process by which white, middle-to-low income men begin to identify with the specific cultural heritage of middle-to-low income men in the south. As in (from John Skrentny at Rustbelt Intellectual:
The novelist and essayist Dave Eggers – himself a product of the Chicago suburbs – once wrote that the Midwest can be found 25 miles outside of any American city. But I think what is happening, and it is something with important implications for American politics, is that we are finding the American South all over the country. There is a “Southernization” of American politics. ...
The death-knell for the distinctiveness of the old Rust Belt working class may have sounded when comedian Jeff Foxworthy, a native of Georgia wildly successful for his “you know you're a redneck when – ” comedy theme, appropriated the phrase “blue collar” for a show about the zany antics of himself and some other wacky hillbillies. “Blue Collar TV,” as it is called, is not about unions or white ethnics.
Neologism of the day number two: Palinification. (From Tom S. at Rustbelt Intellectual) "[A] substitution of bilious sloganeering for intelligent, if dangerously wrongheaded analysis." Or, in my words, the slow transition from pandering to some mythical "regular joe" voter to outright know-nothingism and political-intellectual Pentecostalism.
Neologism of the day number three: political-intellectual Pentecostalism. A disdain for classic intellectualism and the epistimically responsible knowledge-gathering, marked by an over-reliance on "the gut" and an irrational distrust of "the elites".
Since I thought this one up, I might as well give the background for it. Let's start with the case of Anne Hutchinson in the Puritan New England. Sarah Vowell explains:
What I took from this revelation was that no one else was responsible for my salvation--that no church, no preacher, not even the Bible, come to think of it, had power over me. My highest authority was the spiritual presence within. ...
The difference between Anne Hutchinson and her accusers is that Hutchinson believes that anyone, even a nonbeliever, can seem saved. The only way to know one is saved is when one feels saved.
Hutchinson is pushing American Protestantism further, toward a practice approaching the more personal, ecstatic, anti-intellectual, emotional slant now practiced in the U.S.A., especially in the South and Midwest. We call that swath of geography the "Bible Belt," but that would have been a more accurate description of bookish seventeenth-century New England. While modern evangelicals obviously set store in the Bible, their partiality for alone time with their deity means that a truer name for what we now call the Bible Belt might be something along the lines of the Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ Belt, or the Filled with the Holy Spirit Basket of America.
Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. ON the one hand the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. ...
On the Other hand, Protestantism's shedding away of authority ... inspires self-reliance--along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy--namely a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It's why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol' boy who's fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed.
Also, this (via Swampland) from some random no-name Republican strategist:
[Palin] has this very Pentecostal view of the world. We don't need to study the Bible, we don't need ministers, we can just feel the spirit and let the spirit speak through us. ... We don't need to read or even learn because that just fills our heads with confusing ideas and facts and figures. We feel. Bush plays at this anti-elite stuff but he's Harvard/Yale/Andover, all of that. She is really a celebration of a glorious know-nothingness that is truly dangerous.
I'd like to point out that this isn't in any way about keeping down the "regular folks" in America. The fact is, I have a much higher view of the regular folks than the Governor Palin, the media, or the Republican Party in general seems to. I don't think that one has to pander to know-nothingism to get their votes. The people who celebrate this kind of intellectual-political Pentecostalism are not--often--Pentecostal religiously. Nor are they "the Common Man or Woman". The people who celebrate it are certain segments of the Republican base who shout racist, violent, Brownshirt-esque shit at rallies. The people who celebrate it can be found on the once-smart National Review. As Tom S. from Rustbelt Intellectual writes:
The Republicans are whipping their wingnut base into a frenzy about Barack Obama and his scary otherness. The results are not pretty. But Obamaphobia has reached new levels of absurdity among the once formidable conservative intelligentsia. For the last few days, they have wrangled over whether Obama is a Maoist, a Stalinist, or a Democratic Socialist. The discussion is truly absurd.
If you want a glimpse of some of those "regular Americans" so valued, inexplicably, by the overpaid, overfluffed pundit jerk-circle, go take a look at George Paker's piece in The New Yorker this week. Do this especially if you live, like me, in Oberlin. This is a town not that far from here. I swear, I haven't read something this moving in quite some time.
Go, read
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