In Ignorance is Strength
Thursday, September 04, 2008
If they held the Nixon-Kennedy debates now, Nixon would win. His sweating and hunching and discomfort would put him over. In a small way, that's a good sign. So few Americans are competent to pay their mortgages, achieve in the collegiate arena, organize wars, fix health care, theorize either Marxism or its opposite, or eat a healthy meal seven days a week it begs the question of how the competent got that way, or how they can be expected to proceed, so armed, among the rest of us. People want to vote for the candidate most like themselves, which is to say, someone entirely unprepared to deal with the 21st Century world.
Sarah Palin's speech at the RNC seemed, to my ears, as if it were being recited by a high school forensics student. Apparently, that is not what was heard by the media and by the attendees at the RNC. It seemed at first, from the way they were talking, as if they saw a stateswoman up there. But that's not right, is it? What they saw instead was not righteous indignation against Barak Obama's community service -- it was complete bafflement over what the hell community service is supposed to mean. She alone had the audacity to display her absolute ignorance of the subject.
I trust this impulse in spite of myself. I'm voting for Obama but I have to admit the guy creeps me out. There must be something wrong with the really competent, I feel it too. Some professed inability to sweat. The crisis in intellectual politics these days is not that it's being attacked -- it will always be attacked -- but in the way that it defends itself. Instead of saying that there's no evidence for God, we watch Dawkins bend over backwards to prove that it cannot exist. We're proud of our incompetence because it's more sophisticated. Can Democrats do something about this? Is it possible for us to be honestly ignorant about stuff? Or will we continue to flail around in bursts of measured self-defense?
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:19 PM,
