Every time Progressives bash Sarah Palin, George Bush, etc on grammar we weaken our movement and thus people, animals, our planet die a little more.
One mental exercise I like to do nowadays is to think that everyone has a point. Everyone is trying to make a good point about something. Sarah Palin, Tea Partiers are no different. They may wrap up their good point with a million billion bad, racist, anti-semitic, dumb other points but what is their good point?
They keep talking about "elite's" who live different lives from the rest of us. These elites don't know what its like to survive day to day, they say. They drive subarus, drink lattes while the rest of us struggle to get by.
While all the logic and philosophy professors here can claim that they alone use logic all the time, they are mistaken and they really piss off everyone else. The reality is that in becoming a college professor, that person gave up being a regular person in a regular community. They gave up having to worry about how to make a buck and live on the edge like everyone in favor of a tenured position where they get their intellegence constantly validated. Even if poor, those people still know how to be elites - like proudly saying they don't own a TV.(yes I spelled intelligence wrong on purpose and yes I am dealing in harsh stereotypes where. yes most teachers enormously well grounded).
The same is true for the person who earns a masters in public policy and then goes to work in Washington to help build new highways. Or a person who gets a finance degree and goes to a comfortable life on Wall Street.
I am not claiming that I am any different from this. I have my masters and work in a field where I am trying to help people. I do try to realize what is going on and try to police myself so that I don't pretend that I am better than others. I often fail at this and I realize the consequence when I fail: reinforcing a bad stereotype and making things worse.
What all of this gets at is that there is a tendency of people with advance college degrees etc to think that they are somehow smarter or more logical. We think we are more open minded. We think that our view of tolerance is the correct one. We think we know the one path (even if that path is one of not knowing and being open minded).
Why does this happen? I think it all goes back to the dynamics of 3rd grade. I was the kid who raised his hand a lot and got good grades. Looking back, was I really any smarter than other kids or did I just have different priorities? My parents raised me to follow instructions of the teacher and do good. But I got to think that I was smarter and better than others. Other kids felt like they were dumb and gave up on learnin- for good reason.
Here is what I think happens from the perspective of a C student ( i also got bad grades for a while- long story but part of a Rush Limbaugh phase I went through in high school): they see kids who aren't really that much smarter than them when one looks at the big picture (making friends, fixing cars, playing sports, loving their parents, being courteous, etc) and they get angry. Why should those people get to live out careers in comfortable jobs as Assistant Commissioner of Transportation while I have get by selling used cars? Those people don't know more than I do.
So this brings us to today, where we bash Sarah Palin and claim that we alone use logic. "They" are stupid.
But what if all the C students (let's call them Real Americans for short) have a point? What if the people in DC or in their town who make the rules, really don't have connections to daily lives? This doesn't even need to be true 100% of the time. Just 5% of the time would be enough to piss people off.
I think this is part of the reason why Tea Partiers are so quickly to accept the authority of the idealized wealthy businessman. That man walks among them. At some point he was once like them but he used his relationships with all of us to get out. That is the person we should have in charge. He doesn't forget where he came from (what does that expression really mean anyway?)
I think this is part of the reason they hate public workers who get a good health care. Why should they survive while the rest of us barely get by? What makes them so much better than the rest of us? They see bureaucrats who cling to their jobs long after their passion for service is gone (maybe because they have a good health care plan and just want to give their family of 5 a decent shot at decent health care. good argument for single payer of course).
I think this is why Obama chose Joe "Scranton" Biden. This is why our best spokespeople are guys like Ed Shultz or Jesse Ventura (when not crazy). These are people Real Americans can listen too and learn from.
I think Tea Partiers are actually our natural allies on some fronts- including opposing the bank bailouts. We need to talk to them- not mock their mistakes.
This mechanism of blaming bureaucrats and bankers during a time of crisis is not new. It was done to Jews in Germany and others groups elsewhere. It is happening to us here right now. So when we play into that stereotype, we are reinforcing the image that there are elites who are too arrogant to even have a conversation with regular folk and Real Americans.
The reality is that Sarah Palin does have a point (sort of). If a huge mosque was going up in ground zero, it would be a little weird. admit it. Real Americans just want to have a conversation. Rather than talk to Real Americans and explain what is going on, the nerds, the class suck-ups, th A students (us) just mock them. This breaks down trust and dialog. So later on when we try to explain who the real elites are (corporations etc) all they can hear is that sound of our annoying voices correcting their grammar.
I am probably a worse offender on this stuff than most people here (as I adjust my ascot and sip my free trade coffee. kidding, i just made that up).
I apologize if this is too harsh.
I don't apologize for grammar mistakes. I probably should have made more.
Onward!
UPDATE: I shouldn't have used the term Real Americans to describe folks that listen to Sarah Palin. If you can suggest a term that is not derogotory I would gladly use it.
UPDATE 2: I know the real deal with the mosque makes a lot of sense but I am talking about the pereception of the mosque as a 40 foot tall building on ground zero- not the modest facility 2 blocks away that it really is. As a NYer I thin the mosquae is great. My point is that we spend so much time mocking Sarah etc that we don't get across the facts.
UPDATE 3: I totally agree that the elites really are the corporations and the wealthy. And that they likely got to be elites because of Dad's money. And that Dad's money could have easily come from slavery, busting unions or genocide of Indians. True. True. True. The problem is that when we mock Palin we turn ourselves into the "elite". It is easy for us to become the elite. I was a right winger for a long time and saw first-hand how useful snobbery can be in organizing people who would otherwise agree with us.
UPDATE 3.5 I should be more clear that I am talking about a stereotype of a college professor as well as businessmen. I think the reality is different.
UPDATE 4- Great article from Dragon5616 on how using facts can backfire in a conversation about politics. I take it that it is more important than ever to not mock people in order to communicate an idea. Favorite quote from the article:
"One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not."