". . . he was systematical, and like all systematick reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture every thing in nature to support his hypothesis. In a word, I repeat it over again; -- he was serious."
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
I may be guilty of being fey from time to time, or giving in to the abstract
muse(I've looked, and the "muse of abstraction" is, in fact, an empty name; Clito plays lead guitar, Euterpe's never alone, Melpomene and Thalia invented the
Values Voter Summit, Terpsichore
writes Gingrich's speeches, Polymnia was last seen trying to dig up Mencken, Calliope has been put to work as an CFO, and the other one I haven't seen), and I'm fixin' to drop a very heavy post, but I get aggravated when the tighty righties accuse me, or people like me (are there people like me? I get "likes" from time to time; is that the same thing?), of being out of touch or too intellectual or artsy (I may be the other, "fartsy" -- especially if Palin's talking) or insisting on "little details" and "technicalities." Not only does it bother me, but it
has bothered me since I first went to collage (sic) back when punk rock was newish and Jimmy Carter wasn't "the worst president in U.S. history" for the first time.
I have remarked elsewherethat there are ideas and observations that stick in the mind like a bit of gravel in the tread of one's sneaker. They keep making noises at certain steps, on certain surfaces. When Ronald Reagan said, "Well... [huff, huff]] there you go again, Mr. President," I could hear twenty million knees getting slapped across America. At the same time, Reagan actually followed that playground taunt with a rather transparently incorrect dodge: Reagan did want to reduce Medicare. However, the guffaw "won," we were told by our television "experts." They told us that that remark was the end for Carter. Never mind that the popular vote in the election was extremely close, the experts knew better.
People like me who insisted that the point after the taunt make sense were spoilsports. People who said that the "landslide election" of 1980 wasn't a landslide were talking "technicalities." If you go around to the public square of your town or a web forum today, you will discover that 10 of 10 respondents who know about the 1980 election will say that it was an historic landslide for Reagan and marked the "Reagan revolution."
So, what am I complaining about -- that people are too busy to investigate? that the world is dumb? that people are inexpert? No. From my internal exile in 1980 and through all the years of being in the cold as a Democrat, I attempting to analyze what it was that severed the connections. Why was it that "colleges are liberal," when I know that they are not and that anti-intellectualism is respectable in America?
I think, to be brief, it is synecdoche. (Yeah, big help, I know. Nothing like using Greek terms to talk about why people think I'm not talking the same language as the common man.) The word, as Charlie Kaufman pointed out, is pronounced like the city in New York, and it means using a part to represent the whole or a piece to represent the assemblage. If someone says, "Hey, nice wheels!" the person is referring to the whole car but using the wheels as a representative (or "head of cattle" or "lend a hand," etc.).
You see, as symbol making and symbol using and symbol passing critters, we like synecdoche. We thrive on microcosm to macrocosm. It's a good thing. However, it also leads to invading Iraq to "get Saddam." You want to get Saddam, call a cop. A nation is millions of people, not a leader. Synecdotal thinking leads us to slogans like "Dukakis let Willie Horton go free" or "foodstamp President."
Recently, fellow Kossack Steven D had a diary about "the Bumper Sticker Party," where a vast pie slice of people (I suppose it's more like Pac Man than a slice of pie, since it always seems to be hungry and always seems to have its jaws poised above and below us) vote based on slogans and platitudes. He is right, of course, but, aside from "Nuke Their Ass and Take Their Gas" being an act of aggression on display designed, one assumes, to persuade or infuriate, it is also an affirmation that the driver does not want to get into "details." The same person probably believes that "criminals get off on technicalities all the time." When I've taught a class on legal writing, I've asked students if they thought that "technicalities" let the guilty go free often, and every class had said "yes." "Technicalities" are like "details": they obscure the essential truth, which is a simple statement that is true in miniature and on a grand scale.
Republicans, and some Democrats, argue fairly frequently, that education and government both have a problem because they're not being run "like a business." W. Bush promised to be "the first CEO president." Back in 2000, Americans apparently didn't know what CEO's did. Bush showed us. They walk into a room, demand executive summaries from the heads of divisions, shout down "details" and other things that would debase their natural genius, and then, like W., they decide. They are also supposed to have "the vision thing," of course. In fact, that's why they're paid the Satanically obscene amounts they are. American voters and the people who think that I am hung up on technicalities and details understand this synecdoche. They get it. Politicians say, "If you ran your household the way the government does, you'd..." and then go on. (If my household were like the US government, then I'd pretty soon own the neighbor's car. Heck, I'd have so many guns the meter reader would never come close!)
You see, government and education are not free market businesses. They do not respond to supply and demand. They cannot raise prices or advertise. They just plain aren't for profit entities, and they will face constant demand regardless of their supplies (hence, um, "developing nation" status, world hunger, etc.) and set the value of their own goods in an internal market (or used to, anyway). This objection, though, is a detail.
[You were saying something about porridge? I clicked on this diary for porridge!]
Right.
See, back in the day, I was learning vast amounts from a relatively unpublished professor who had had enough with a literary theory called New Historicism. Her objection was that it sampled culture. Well, she had other objections, but that's one of the best objections. She said that it required culture to be a gigantic Jell-o. Thus, the New Historicist found a diary from a mentally ill cross-dressing forger who was also a bi-racial freed slave and, from that diary, adduced all sorts of wonderful things about the "culture" of the nineteenth century, or the New Historicist looked through the testimony under torture of a Puritan in the dungeons of Elizabeth and comes to fascinating insights about the cultural anxieties of Tudor power. Such readings are nuts on their face, and their only slim hope of having validity is that "culture" is one big blob.
Let me put it another way. If I asked you, right now, "What do white people think about gay rights," could you answer? Wouldn't you object? Wouldn't you say, "That's a bullcrap category, and who could possibly know?" And yet we have much less trouble hearing people say, "Black people today think..." or "Women are entirely in favor of..." or "the gay population wants...." If there is no consistency or uniformity today in a ruling and dominant group, what on earth makes anyone think that any other group is uniform, or that any past time was more uniform?
[I didn't want Jello.]
Jello applies to culture and history. Porridge, I think, is politics. When people -- you know People (about whom I will generalize even as I decry generalizations in general) -- go to grab simple principles and wield them like a stick at a pinata (i.e. blindfolded), they are assuming porridge. That a thing would be true on the playground and international treaties ("I would tell OPEC, 'Look, you've had your fun, but the party's over'") requires viewing the universe as porridge. Dip your spoon in the center or the edge, and you get the same thing out. It's porridge in one place, so it's going to be porridge another place. If it ain't no way to run a business, then it ain't no way to run a school, dammit!
So, folks, we've got two choices, it seems to me.
[Does either involve a Quaker?]
We can either start devising porridge-slogans that prey upon the minds of our fellow citizens and leave them in their darkness, unmediated and unremedied, or we can begin to warn them, every time all the time, that they need to be careful. Sometimes what's in the spoon isn't a raisin.