For a generation, conservative culture warriors have raged at liberals for orchestrating the dumbing-down of America. From the new math to whole language to even affirmative action, they argue, progressives have emasculated our educational standards. Through a morally and ethically dangerous relativism, the left has destroyed the conventions of our culture on every level.
Meanwhile, it is the right who has been identified with a rear-guard action to defend an America where people speak and reason properly, where language doesn't devolve into the lowest common denominator, where phrases born in rap culture, like "shout out" don't find their way into a vice-presidential debate.
So let's play a thought game. Imagine if a folksy, inexperienced black woman was nominated to be vice president on the Democratic ticket. And imagine that instead of coming from Alaska she came from Alabama, and instead of dropping white aw-shucksisms like "Doggone" and "You betcha" into her conversation, she used the equivalent black vernacular.
Imagine, as well, if her sentences didn't come close to parsing, if they were wickedly ungrammatical -- no, anti-grammatical -- clouds of disconnected thoughts and sound bites. The right would rise up in indignation and disgust, and the most vitriolic, the Rush Limbaughs, the Michael Savages, would decry the presence of Ebonics on the national stage.
Were she black, Sarah Palin's performance would have been skewered by the right as undignified and demeaning to the office she seeks. But because she is a culture warrior in heels, she is hailed by the right as a breath of populist fresh air, and her use of what conservatives once sniffed at as "substandard English" is celebrated as a signifier of her glorious everydayness.
There was a time when you could be a progressive and still respect American conservatives, at least from a Burkean perspective. On one hand, intellectual champions like Buckley offered a worthy opposition and admirable erudition. And on the other hand, the left's willingness to become identified with an ideology that sought to warehouse spelling, long division, and Tolstoy, was dumb.
But with their combination of anti-intellectualism and over-injection of religion into the public sphere, as reified by the Governor of Alaska, the conservative movement has abandoned any claim on our intelligence. You betcha.
What would Abe Lincoln think? That group has no decency-- they are shameless!
then she can learn how to say "nuclear".
Her accent is an affectation, just like W's.
She is a fake, and is trying to play games with everyone who is dumb enough to listen.
Palin stategy: Please have another six-pack Joe.
Your insinuation that injection of religious dialog being equivalent to anti-intellectualism is indicative of your own biases and preconceptions of acceptable public behavior, as well as revealing your bias against anyone with religious beliefs, regardless of that religious faith. As someone who has put his faith and trust in the person of Jesus Christ, and takes that dedication seriously, I consider the contemporary Republican Party too far on the political LEFT for my taste.
There is an enormous difference between uneducated and unintelligent. You run the danger of confusing the two. If you are the fortunate few that have an Ivy league education, that doesn't mean you are more or less worthy of anything than I am with my Associates Degree from a Community College. If you have a problem with the presumed level of eduction or degree of elocution of someone else being a measure of their capabilities to a particular position, then *you* are practicing intellectual zealotry and perpetuating class warfare.
Any off-hand dismissals of someone's views from a non-metropolitan area is preventing you from learning about a completely different way of life with a different set of values and priorities. By engaging this different perspective on life, you gain, at the least, an understanding of viewpoints you may not espouse.
I may differ from you in my viewpoints, but I will still respect you by not denigrating you by implication as you did in the summary paragraph of your article.
That's an simple one; Stupid people are easy to control.
In any fascist or totalitarian society, the first people to be attacked are inevitably the "Intellectuals" of the society. This is followed by book burning, social, and financial harassment, and eventually physical attacks upon anyone not deemed sufficiently "pure", either ethnically or politically.
Usually one group (religious or ethnic) is targeted as having "infected" the populace and thus causing "all" of societies problems, and thus must be eliminated to "cure" society of it's ills.
This is all encouraged by those in power because the stupider people are, the easier they are to control via propaganda, and they become so obsessed with the "OTHER" that must be purged that they do not notice the looting of the countries treasury by the people in power.
This is an OLD story that has occurred many many times in history.
As Mark Twain said; "History many not repeat itself, but it frequently rhymes."
Let's expand our thought game a bit and ask how the public would respond if our "folksy, inexperienced black woman" from Alabama had a 17-year-old daughter who was pregnant out of wedlock.
What would William Kristol say, I ax you?
start inhalin'
gop wailin'
trailin'
flailin'
bailin'
failin'
sarah palin
back to whalin'
If she were ANYTHING but a conservative Republican her "performance would have been skewered by the right as undignified and demeaning to the office she seeks."
Here, we have a VP who not only could become President in the next year or two, but who would have beaten a path to such power, while being kept under wraps of the republican machine from ever speaking to the traveling press. The status quo in America is conservative, as Palin sudden and scary rise attests, and it will be this right slant which continues to whine about the awful liberal press, as it continues to maintain power for the few 1%ers who actually run this nation.
No better way to hide one's own power and authority, than to forment anger and faux outrage about others' motives---and after a while, it becomes a given.
Who''s the Obaman?
And to all who continue to ridicule those who speak in such a dialect I would like to offer this advice: CUT IT OUT!
Just because a person speaks with a certain dialect DOES NOT mean they are unintelligent or incapable of understanding intricacies of policy and its effect on them.
They don't listen when you speak because they know you insult them behind their backs. They don't listen to you when you explain the issues because you don't explain it in language they understand.
Speaking properly does not make your life inherently more worthy of existence than theirs.
AND they can vote BOTTOM LINE: Do you want their vote or do you just want to feel superior?
Because you can't win their vote until you SHOW some RESPECT for them, their lives and their speech.
Coexistence
Obama/Biden '08
I echo your sentiments.
With he exception of "Coexistence". There are some in this world that have one purpose: once they achieve power they will do all they can to eliminate us and/or our views from the planet, barring that, they would have us under complete subjugation.
How does one "coexist" with that?
Without a doubt. Thank you for exposing the right-wing's racist double-standard.
Indeed, were she black, Sarah Palin's daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy would have been treated as a scandal that would have forced her to leave the race.
And were she black, Sarah Palin's "blessing" by a so-called witch doctor in her church would have have made the controversy over Wright seem like small potatoes.
The acronym used to be IOKIYAR. Which is apt in this case. But equally on the mark is this: IOKIYW.