"In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others." Mikhail Bakhtin
It is hard to believe, I know, but I met Barack Obama on more than few occasions before he received the Nobel Prize and found him to be kind of a dope. A real dope, a pissy, snotty and insecure Ivy League educated dope. I don't think that all that Hope and Change wised him up, but I wish him God Speed!
I judge people by the way they treat other people and me as well. I have met many well educated people ( they went to college) who could not and can not make change, book a hotel reservation, or remember to leave a tip after a huge feed. I know pipe-fitters who are jazz scholars, readers of Foucualt, Derrida and Bakhtin - very dismissive of the two former and firmly in the camp of the later.
Bakhtin was a Russian literary and language theorist who studied the 'carnivalesque' nature of rebellion, non-conformity and resistance to artificial constraints upon the individual - think of a Retirement Roast as an example. The 'honoree' sits and takes verbal abuse in 'tribute' to his/her life. The Comedy Central Roasting of Ann Coulter comes to mind,, where everything about that persons gender, race, religion, education, career choices and personal relationships was reduced to the gimlet eye of left-wing politics. Another example might be a a faculty meeting in a Catholic high school to kick off the school, where the educated persons of the same faith are required to read a meaningful group prayer from a Xerox'ed copy. No wonder most teachers squirm and act out.
Today, once again, a person with the personality of a dial tone and humanity of a Grand Vizier, explains that huge percentage of American voters are uneducated.
CNN's Fareed Zakaria previewed his documentary Why Trump Won Monday on Wolf Blitzer's afternoon TV program. Zakaria said Trump supporters are "tribal" and saw the 2016 presidential election as an act of cultural and class rebellion against the "educated" urban professionals.
"We tried to get at that deeper issue, which is really a portrait of America," Zakaria said of his investigation into Trump supporters. "A kind of cultural and class portrait of an America that feels deeply resentful about the direction the country is going in and the people who run the country. People, you know, who are professionals, urban, educated. This is, in a sense, an act of class rebellion. It is an act of cultural rebellion. And Donald Trump is their guy."
People who run the country are " People, you know, who are professionals, urban, educated." Yet, Donald Trump and Mike Pence and Steve Bannon and Kelly Anne Conway and Jeff Session and Gen. Kelly are 'running the country.' Fareed? What's the deal?
Why would the uneducated massed vote for educated ( Trump, Pence, Bannon, Conway, Sessions, Kelly et al), urban professionals to be our guys?
This is what my pipe-fitter pal and Mikhail Bakhtin would call a 'carnivalesque' moment. You see, locked-up mumpish misanthropes with puckered sphincters, like Fareed Zakaria, Bruce Wolf and retired Vice Admiral John Kirby object to pipe-fitters, cops, firemen, school teachers, cab and Uber drivers, especially when they ain't buying what Fareed is selling. They squirm away from faked good-humor, prayer that requires prayer sheets and snobbery.
The Carnival is a Catholic concept - the Feast of All Fools, It was the one day where the poor, the eccentric, the naked, the loutish, the buffoonish and the heckling classes were free to scorn the prelates, the viziers, the scribes and the pharisees.
Our scribes and pharisees, academics and the media, created Obama and they are really missing his empty rhetorical smirking self-satisfaction. They are jones-ing bad.
Educated Americans voted for Donald Trump and against Obama and Hillary. Many educated Americans and many more very wise Americans.
Old Dead Eyes is one of the reason why the Church created carnivals.
Pipefitters know that.
