anti-intellectual a-pop-calytpic

Music: The String Cheese Incident: Live in Austin Texas (The Backyard), March 2001 When Sunday slowness and grading bad student papers mix, ranting is sometimes a curious progeny (take that as a warning, gentle reader). I've always found the sometimes overly zealous grandstanding against "anti-intellectualism" by the academic Left—especially the self-appointed vanguards of theory—mildly irritating. I say mildly because, on the one had, righteousness is sometimes a good thing and can actually get things done (that is not an endorsement, however, Lil' Bushie). I say irritating because, despite the many virtues of critical thinking, sometimes that thinking can be used toward mean ends and to make fun of the innocent ignorance of others.

Nevertheless, if I may constellate two white dwarves from the past week: First, a story has just come out regarding two enterprising MIT students who created a computer program that randomly generates so-called postmodern gibberish. The students "questioned the standards of some academic conferences," so they wrote this program to create nonsensical papers and, lo and behold, one of them was accepted for a conference. (Now, it goes without saying that anyone in academics anywhere knows that one can probably wipe your ass with 5th grade poetry and get it accepted as art or knowledge at some conference some where; when in doubt, there's always the annual Popular Culture Association Conference). It is, of course, an echo of the Sokal Affair, yet another "prank" waged in the so-called "culture wars."

Second, a new, multi-million dollar miniseries, Revelations, debuted on the National Broadcasting Company network last Wednesday (and repeats this evening), which attempts to provide an account of John of Patmos' occult vision of the End of Days. Such an account, of course, is a blatant rip-off of the vengeful Christ's return in the Left Behind book series, which novelizes—in thousands upon thousands of pages—an innovation in church doctrine that can be traced back to the quasi-spiritualist teachings of the Irvingites, promulgated and popularized by John Darby in the nineteenth century (on the quick and dirty: basically, the story is that the faithful will be called to heaven before the antichrist makes the globe his oyster). Nevertheless, I did watch the debut and will see the entire series, insofar as it intersects with my personal and scholarly interests and, well, it's much more than a television event: Revelations represents the outworking of a cultural and political politics particular to our time, most especially since evangelical beliefs have increasingly dominated the political theatre, first in the (middle) East, now with Lil' Bushie (dialectal foil to the prison-bound Lil' Kim) in the West. Insofar as our president has declared himself St. Michael in the flesh, when a major television network devotes significant dollars and time to airing an evangelical interpretation of Scripture, especially when Kirk Cameron, Howie Mandel, or Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston are not involved, we really should to take notice.

So, on the one hand, some "clever" graduate students poke fun of pomo prose (it has just occured to me, dear reader, that there may be an associo-semantic rationale for postmodernism's bad "rap"; its slang form, "pomo," is phonetically too reminiscent of "porno", that which, in fact, yokes Lil' Kim to Lil' Bushie by way of Mel Gibson's "passion"). On the other, blind faith in a vengeful God is aired as "entertainment." The common cause of both events is a negotiation of and over the figure of the Great Professor, a figure that is well-known, overly stereotyped, and increasingly under attack. I won't recount my own personal run-ins with the sons and daughters of wealthy southern lawyers and socialites, or the mistaken attribution of power made by students, their families, and professors alike. Instead, we'll just recount the function of the professor in Revelations: first, there's the protagonist, Bill Pullman, a real Doubting Thomas whose daughter is killed by servant of Satan in a ritual sacrifice; he has no faith, but upon meeting a crazy Nun with a Ph.D. (see, they do give those things to just about anyone willing to endure the scholarly rites of torture), he starts to realize that all that stuff he once understood as "knowledge" is mere bullshit, and that he really needs to get down with the Vengeful Jesus Program (hereafer VJP). Bill Pullman represents the stupid and soulless ranks of the scholar-teacher. Hooray! Then there's Pullman's mentor, played by John Rhys-Davies, who opens the series with a lecture to his students on the Big Bang. An earnest young man asks something to the effect of, "well, where is God in all this." Rhys-Davies retorts, in a booming male voice, that science makes room for everything and everyone, even God, if only "he" would make "himself" known (my good friend and colleague Jenny Stromer-Galley commented she is so tired of the bombastic or arrogant white male (usually a Harvard professor, right?) as our professoriate poster boy). Both fictional professors are dumb to the signs that the end is near.

Similarly, suggest the clever MIT grads, postmodern theorists, caught in sticky mire of their excretions (jargon and gibberish), are dumb to common sense. In short, professors are idiots and soulless.

I admit I am becoming tired of these attacks and fears, which have only relatively recently begun to chafe. Most of the good people who dedicate themselves to the life of the mind are the antithesis of idiocy or soullessness. I suppose this is the irony of the anti-intellectual's charge.

I have often thought it but bit my tongue, yet, since I'm a bit pissy today, I'll let it out: people often fear what they don't know or understand. In other words, anti-intellectualism is a synonym for stupidity. Some people—and certainly a handful of grad students I've met since coming to LSU—don't merit the kinder euphemism.