When Sarah Palin & other 'commoners' attack 'elites,' America suffersWhen Sarah Palin & other 'commoners' attack 'elites,' America suffers
Sunday, November 9th 2008
Minstrel is as minstrel does. Republican attack dogs have begun to tear at Sarah Palin. Now, unnamed insiders say Palin is an arrogantly ignorant person who should have never been there next to John McCain. But while she rode high, these same people touted her common quality and her straight talk and what one commentator on MSNBC called her version of "populist minstrelsy." Good shot.
What we may be rejecting now is not just Palin but a tactic - one that at least has been momentarily blunted. It has been useful for conservatives and others - including black academics who kneel to hip hop - who prop up a straw version of "authenticity" as the ring in the nose of the masses.
The supposed "reality" of a woman like Palin, however, is no more than the manipulative cultivation of every kind of paranoia commonly felt by the less well-educated when faced with complexity and sophistication. Small town "goodness" is supposed to be the best defense against so-called elitism. Goodness alone, however, is never good enough. It must be combined with real skill, imagination and resilience.
"Populist minstrelsy" is often seen in the black academics who embrace and excuse the violence, misogyny and crudely materialistic imbecilities dominating the most popular hip hop. They manipulate black college students into booking them to speak at their campuses for very high fees.
But in the end, this is only a ploy to exploit those who fear the charges of "acting white" if they do well, study hard and become the exceptional sophisticates and professionals who should both enrich our society and make us better competitors in this economically interwoven age of global competition.
While the rejection of the Republican Party in 2008 mirrors the rejection of the cultural desperation of black college students, it has other roots as well. These extend back to the McCarthy era of smearing by association, the attack on Adlai Stevenson for being an "egghead" - the term of choice before the "elite" attack had been hatched. There are also roots in the hatred of intellect fostered by Richard Nixon, along with "core American values" that were picked up on by Ronald Reagan.
This backward garbage gumbo always ended up being served at the deregulation benefit balls where "the market" was transformed into a floating financial god of profit and loss made manifest by the invincible laws of goods and services.
Voodoo economics. Even James Baker - one-time Treasury secretary to Reagan - has observed that our present financial crisis is too large to be corrected by the private sector and the government must move in. Ignorance down below makes those at the top so arrogant that they become naive themselves.
Here's how it is. Our culture is run through with symbolic attacks on the educated and elite, who must always avoid becoming out of touch with the dirt down here on the ground and what actually has to be done in order to clean things up.
But our culture cleans house at the opposite end as well. It is run through with many tales told in one medium or another where someone from the bottom - or quite willing to exploit those at the bottom! - has a very simple job. Play the populist minstrel in order to take power. Once there, the salt-of-the earth person from the bottom becomes the corrupt bully at the top.
So all Americans willing to excuse and embrace ignorance, paranoia, poor performance or anti-social behavior should listen closely to Barack Obama when he says that it is time for young black men of the hip-hop generation to pull up their pants. No matter the color or the background, any American buying into a simpleminded vision of life in our moment of unprecedented intricacy is buying into solitary confinement. Pull your pants up.
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/columnists/crouch/index.html
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