RATIONAL IMPLICATIONS - Smiley's People
Consider these two lists of occupations:
A .........................B
Actor ................Business Owner
Lawyer ...............Engineer
Teacher ..............Physician
Writer................Soldier
Now ask yourself these questions:
1. In which occupations are earnings fundamentally dependent on the ability to tell a story well?
2. In which occupations are earnings fundamentally dependent on the ability to perceive the facts of a given situation clearly?
3. Which occupations place a higher premium on decisive action?
4. What political parties do you associate with each list of occupations?
The Democratic Party has evolved into a coalition of relatively articulate people whose daily lives are not strongly tethered to reality. It is in large measure a party of glib, silly people. (In the cases of Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite, that may be an excessively charitable assessment.)
Novelist Jane Smiley's recent and widely noticed bit of splenetic foolishness is a particularly apt example of what I'm talking about, although nearly any article in Slate could serve my purposes equally well. Having reflected for over a day on the historical forces represented by the Republicans' across-the-board victory, Ms. Smiley appears to have found its direct antecedent in Quantrill's Raid, a terrorist atrocity of 1862. (I am not making this up.) Presumably in Smiley's world the electoral effects of September 11 will begin to manifest themselves sometime around the year 2146.
Since Smiley's novels are not nearly as humorless and idiotic as her political musings, the deficiencies in her political thought cannot convincingly be attributed to severe mental or emotional disability. And yet her political analysis resembles the lunatic ravings of a person who's been in solitary confinement for an extended period. Or, what is nearly the same thing, she sounds like a typical poster at Democratic Underground.
I doubt that Jane Smiley has discussed politics with a Republican other than one of her relatives (whom she describes as "not ignorant, ... just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority" [sic]) in a very long time, if ever. She probably thinks that she doesn't know any Republicans, since few rational people would be so foolish as to knowingly flip the switch on her rage machine. To employ a little lit-crit jargon, in Smiley's world Republicans are the Other--alien savages who must be subdued in defense of a superior culture.
Jane Smiley and her ilk do indeed live in a sort of solitary confinement of their own choosing. They live in a realm of talk, where the winning arguments are not those that are the most firmly rooted in facts and logic, but the ones that are the most intricately crafted. They are critics, not doers, for in the realm of talk actions are only valuable as subjects for commentary. Guessing is what must be done by doers; second-guessing is the province of talkers.
The election just concluded was at its base a clash between the realm of talk and the realm of action. At a time when the will to act has rarely been more vital, the nation chose wisely. If there is a logical explanation for the vituperation of Smiley's people, it must be that they have caught a fleeting glimpse of their own irrelevance reflected in the election returns. On the other hand, they just might be crazy. After all, that wouldn't impede their ability to earn a living in the realm of talk. |
