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Melinda,
I'm so glad you posted on Christopher Buckley leaving the National Review. I was saddened to read his column in the Daily Beast saying he'd left. Also, I had just been conjuring up a post in response to your post and Ellen's from earlier today, in our ongoing discussion about intellectualism and what it is and why it's become a smear, and I think the Buckley story fits in. I especially appreciated Ellen for both calling me out on making intellectual a dirty word and for bringing me into the ranks of great thinkers (even though I spend far more time curled up with Sports Illustrated than with The New Yorker).
It was unwise and unfair of me to group intellectuals as a whole in with the condescending elites that bug me so much, and I admit I was probably thinking of someone like the gentleman Melinda worked for, who constantly reminded others of his genius. Haughtiness drives me batty, and so does what I perceive as intolerance. Which brings me back to Christopher Buckley. It's annoying when smarty-pants liberals say, "Why I don't know anyone who would vote for that imbecile George Bush/John McCain," and it's just as annoying when it comes from the opposite direction, when an angry mob takes on an individual who arrived at a different conclusion from them after much thought. (I've seen Rich Lowry's response, and I find it hard to believe that a great magazine like the National Review doesn't have room for both Christopher Buckley and Mark Steyn, who recently earned a huge victory for free speech in Canada.)
What made me especially sad was Buckley's assertion that the Republican Party was more "yurt" than big tent. The rest of you might laugh at me for thinking so, but I have always felt that GOP was a bigger tent than most outsiders gave it credit for. I know more pro-choice Republicans than I do pro-life Democrats. I know Republicans who are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and some who are not religious at all. Some of us can't get too worked up about global warming, but that doesn't stop us from recycling and setting the thermostat at 68 in the winter. I've written a lot on this blog about how dismayed I am with our national discourse, about how divisive and bitter some have become. It hurts even more when those within my own party resorts to petty tactics and cruel words against one another.
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Just a quick note: Conservative Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, who once said that "unless you think hard about political questions in our culture, you are liberal by default" and that "you have to think your way out of liberalism" has—you guessed it—denounced Palin. "Enough," she wrote in the City Journal yesterday. "Conservatives should stand for excellence and merit, period. Middle-class status is neither a qualification nor a disqualification; the same goes for economic success."
What I draw from this latest anti-Palin diatribe is 1) Palin's effectively holding up a mirror to the Republican Party, and not everyone likes what they see and 2) a multi-party system with micro-parties for Palin-Republicans, fiscal conservatives, Clinton-Democrats, cheeseeatingsurrendermonkey-ophiles, etc. would be far less problematic then the big-tent two-party system we have now. I wish I didn't have to vote for Democrats who say "socialism" like it's a bad word, I wish Heather Mac Donald, David Brooks, and others didn't have to vote for Republicans who don't live up to their standards of "excellence," and, yes, I wish Palin supporters could back her without having to justify their opinions to people within their own party.
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I really appreciate Bill Bishop's well-argued point in Slate today that there is no women's vote, or even white women's vote, at stake in this election. The idea is that the categories are too broad to be meaningful; even two women of the same race and class who went to the same high school or college may have too little in common to be targeted effectively by the same advertising message. Instead, campaigns should slice and dice by lifestyle—VW-driving moms who don't own TVs, city-dwelling twentysomethings who drink diet soda religiously. We each deserve our own personally tailored message!
OK, I get it, and I bow to the marketing gods of fine dicing—with two caveats. First, I rue the tedious quest for the next great swing voting bloc (soccer moms, hockey moms, offended military wives). Bishop is really arguing against this, because based on his thesis there is no identifiable swing group big enough to get your hands around, at least nationally speaking. But if we forget to dice finely enough, we end up back in the land of the Red Lobster exurbs. Second, I wonder if Bishop's argument about class holds entirely true, at least if you factor in geography. Do white women who make less than $50,000 a year and live in southern Ohio, say, really fracture into lots of little voting pieces? Do white women who make more than $100,000 a year and live in Miami?
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It's unbelievable that Christopher Buckley has been asked to clean out his cubby at the magazine his father founded—"briskly'' allowed to resign for the sin of endorsing Obama. Where the National Review thinks it'll find another writer who can throw around Jane Austen's favorite verb quite the way he does, I aver I don't know. (See? Not even close.) But apparently, even they can't have any damn intellectuals hanging around thinking outside the talking points. Isn't the point of any debate—political or otherwise—that you don't know where an open mind will take you? Hardly worth the trouble if you're required to wind up the same place every single time.
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May I treat this blog as a touchy-feely women’s group for a moment and share something that happened to me this weekend? I was walking with my 2-year-old daughter in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park when, coming over a hill, we caught sight of a huge American flag—I’m talking huge, like half the size of a football field—spread out over the grass of the great lawn. Kids were running up and down the length of the flag while grown-ups sat cross-legged at intervals, sewing on stars and stripes. As it turned out, this was part of a local Obama fundraiser called the Mending Bee for Change; you could contribute by buying a star or get sponsored to stitch the flag.
I didn’t have a cent on me, so my only contribution was a grass stain created when my kid went for a vigorous roll on Old Glory. But something about seeing that homemade parachute-silk flag spread out on the grass, being quietly mended by some and merrily trampled by others, gave me a feeling I don’t think I’ve had in its pure form since childhood: I guess you could call it patriotism, but really it was more like (to use a word that’s nearly been denuded of meaning in this endless campaign) hope. It was just so moving to experience the American flag, not as something politicians brandish to prove a point (I wear one on my lapel! Oh yeah, well, I wear a big sparkly one on my lapel! Hey, I propose amendments against burning them!), but as something for people to gather around, dance on, and mend.
I’m not a believer in the Obamessiah by any stretch—in fact, I pity whichever one of the candidates inherits the mess we’re in. Especially with the economic wreckage now being handed to him, how can our next leader not be a disappointment? But whatever happens, we’re at a historic moment: possibly on the brink of electing an African-American president, yes, but also on the brink of ending a war, creating a national health-care program, and (O frabjous day!) sending George Bush off to cut brush in Crawford, Texas, forever. On Saturday I allowed myself, for a moment, to imagine my future self telling my grown daughter about the time she played ghost underneath an enormous American flag. That was right before Obama got elected, I’d say, and things started to change.
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Rachael, I hate to be the one to have to break it to you, but you are an intellectual. (And I'm not sure when intellectual became such a dirty word.) You were valedictorian of your high-school class. You went to college. You are educated. You are learned. You had to read a few books and understand at least a couple of levels for that to have happened. And you work for the liberal New York media elite! (You don't get off pretending you are "regular folk" just because you live in Ohio!)
But being an intellectual is about more than just reading books or "plowing through studies." It simply means someone who uses their intellect rather than just their emotion. Someone who can think something out and give a reasoned, supported response, rather than simply take an uninformed stance out of fear or ignorance or laziness. (For example, voting the same way their parents do simply because they know of no other way.)
You say,
I've shaped—and reshaped—my beliefs and opinions through years and years of life experience, from debating others and even arguing with myself, from listening to viewpoints both similar to mine and different.
So you've heard other opinions and let them affect you? You've reasoned things out? You've argued with your own points of view? Intellectual!!!
And:
There are times I've struggled with my support for Republicans (though not always for the reasons you might think). I've got a lot of internal conflict about John McCain and Sarah Palin.
You've struggled with your own beliefs? You have internal conflicts? You don't just blindly follow the crowd and follow party lines? Intellectual!!!
I think what thinking people both liberal an conservative object to is not people who believe differently than they do if their beliefs are reasoned, thought out, and supportable, but people whose beliefs come not from the intellect (or even from emotion) but from prejudice, fear, laziness, or ignorance. Not voting for Obama because he is black, because his middle name is Hussein, because he's different, because one believes the rumors that have been spread about him rather than trying to find the truth.
It goes both ways. Not voting for McCain because he's old. There's also been a lot of age discrimination in this campaign that no one has talked about. Not voting for Sarah Palin because she sounds like a bumpkin.
There are plenty of "intellectuals" who aren't book smart, but who debate things: how best to raise their children, which candidate is best, which policy is best, why certain aspects of their religion don't make sense. That's nothing to be ashamed of!
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Rachael, I don't guess I know that many people who think of themselves as intellectuals—or would say so out loud, at any rate, no matter how much they love kicking around ideas. (My mom described me that way once, in anger, and it was soooo not a compliment. "Who died and made you Lionel Trilling, missy?'' was the drift, and doubtless with good reason.)
I did work for an intellectual at one point—and I know this because he spoke of it constantly; in fact, he talked so much about his own heapin' helpin' of smarts that one wondered, as he would have said, how wide-ranging his great thoughts really were.
Public intellectuals in recent political life? Obama would be the first in the White House since ... Woodrow Wilson? (Or can a rip-roaring racist ever qualify as such?) Otherwise, we've had Pat Moynihan, by any standard, Al Gore, as a great prophet and popularizer of science and technology he was quick to grasp the significance of, Bill Bradley in his own mind, thanks to John McPhee, and uh ... not Bill Clinton, though he is definitely 10 kinds of smart. I guess no Republicans spring to mind because they've been running against the Ivory Tower crowd for as long as I can remember.
What does it even mean to be living the life of the mind in this moment of the body/age of the Internet/time of the more, faster, ruder, and right now? I had a French boyfriend—yes, this was after the war—who defined an intellectual as anyone compelled to "passer des nuits blanches'' for the sheer pleasure of it, in the grip of a book. But to then brag about it? Pas sexy, even in France. And in this country, our challenge seems to be to find that middle ground—your favorite spot, Rachael—between pride in mediocrity and pointless showing off. Aspiring to know more should be a given and shared goal rather than, as you say, just another way to divide us into haves and (ha-ha, you down there) have-nots.
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Perhaps it was the overblown coverage of her every move and misstep or perhaps I too have come down with a case of Palin fever. But last Friday, as I read the details of the report confirming that Palin abused her power as governor to get her brother-in-law fired, I was bored.
Troopergate is a significantly more severe infraction than anything she's been accused of since we first met Palin (babygate, rape kits, mochagate) and this time we know she's really guilty. This also isn't a partisan attack (although the McCain spokespeople were quick to categorize it that way): A bipartisan committee of Alaska lawmakers handed down the 263-page conclusive report.
My reserved reaction stemmed from a belief that Palin would live this scandal down. She pretty much already has. Part of her appeal is that everyone, whether or not they like and agree with her, knows a Sarah Palin. And it is more likely that she'll ascend to the vice presidency than be taken down by something as universally relatable as wanting to get back at the man who did her sister wrong.
Republican voters aren't so ignorant or permissive as to condone how Palin did what she did, but she's demonstrated a resilient ability to spin positive. Maybe the "no-good brother-in-law" deserved what he got. Maybe Washington and Wall Street abuse their power more than Palin ever dreamed of doing and this ethically unsound move demonstrates her maverick ability to buck the reins. It doesn't matter really: Palin's excuses are secondary to her charms. After the short-lived MSM flogging, I think Palin remains, to many, just one of the folks. And as the story behind her infamous Newsweek cover was quick to announce: That's the real problem.