Souzek Republic: Cud For You

Cud For You

Whenever I'm feeling short on interesting, intellectual material, I know that a visit to Arts & Letters Daily will clear it right up. The fruits of my last visit:

Why don't Americans vote their own self-interest? They vote their aspirations instead:

"The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them.

It's not hard to see why they think this way. Americans live in a culture of abundance. They have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich."

If you're going to be an enthusiastic defender of capitalism, at least maintain your sense of humor. Hernando de Soto has:

"Marx and Engels, Mr de Soto's pet dogs, were so named because 'they are German, hairy and have no respect for property.'"

Everyone knows David Mamet is a genius of a playwright but his essays are not to be overlooked. Take for example this one, a very personal reflection on his recent visit to Israel:

"To me, a Diaspora Jew, the question is constant, insistent and poignant while in Israel. At this meal it is more than poignant, it is painful. How, I wonder, can I not be here; and how is it possible that I did not come here in my youth, and 'grow up with the country,' instead of wasting my time in show business? I am full of grief, as at a middle-aged meeting with the girl I did not marry.

Now, this blunt trauma of nostalgia is a dead giveaway, signaling not an inability to relive the past, but to face the present. The present, to me, consists in this: that I am an aging Diaspora Jew on a junket, and that my cheap feelings of personal loss could better be expressed as respect and homage.
[...]
Jerusalem has been notorious, since antiquity, for inculcating in the visitor a sense not only of the immediacy but of the solubility of the large questions. I recommend it."

Finally, intellectual life is missing in action on campus:

"One suspect is a prevalent 'work hard, play hard' mentality that leads to 'a strict dichotomy between structured, résumé-building extracurricular activities and activities that provide a mindless release.'

'America is not a deeply intellectual culture,' says Anthony Grafton, a history professor at Princeton. '[Intellectualism] is a countercultural value, not one that most people embrace. It's not what life in the suburbs is about, and most of our wonderfully bright students come from a well-off suburb.'"