Ever on the lips of the right wing are excoriating words for the so-called “liberal elite,” those latté-swilling, Volvo-driving Hollywood producers, college professors, and Washington bureaucrats who supposedly run the lives of poor everyman U.S.A. Whenever I hear this list, the first thing I think is “Yeah, right.” Then I think “College professors?”
You see, I am a member of that last category, or at least I’m an academic, an instructor (non-tenure track I assure you) at a small private college. The liberal part fits in my case, but the elite part and especially the part about running things are just absurd. Anyone who really thinks academics have an undue influence on American culture have obviously never tried to get a group of 20 or so college freshmen to listen to anything at all, much less be influenced by what you say. It’s hard enough to have due influence over most of these kids – er “young adults” – much less to sucker them into our gay-loving, evolution-spouting, Marxist-influenced worldview.
Here’s a good test for how much influence we who teach at institutes of higher learning really have. Ask yourself when the last time was you read a book, that was not a textbook for a class you were taking, that was written by a college professor. Can’t remember? You’re not alone. The books we write primarily get read by other academics and tend to be narrowly focused on our fields of study – like 600 pages on the function of lipids in the human cell or a 1,000 page overview of recent scholarship on James Joyce. If we teach at a research institution, we have to write those books to keep our jobs. Occasionally a title like Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld will spark the popular imagination, but for the most part, the only people we influence are each other*. The sad truth is, as far as most intellectual output from colleges and universities goes, nobody cares.
Indeed, when the insufferably influential critical theorist Jacques Derrida died recently, the only national broadcast venue to even mention it was National Public Radio, and their reach is not nearly what Bill O’Reilly’s is, much less CBS’s or ABC’s. Derrida was the guy who formulated the notion of deconstruction, an idea that the right wing used to consider quite dangerous, and a notion often put at the heart of postmodernism, scourge of right wing intellectuals everywhere. In terms most people know or care about, Derrida’s passing registered not even a blip.
Speaking of right-wing intellectuals, the notion that all academics are lefties is itself absurd. Many of us are, sure, but business and economics departments tend to be filled with laissez-faire libertarian types, and, lest we forget, Newt Gingerich, darling of the liberal-bashing Republican Revolution of 1994, was a history professor.
The idea that we’re elite is also pretty specious. The average college professor’s starting salary is, well, pretty average, in the $40,000 range when those who earn less (like the ones who work at small private colleges and adjuncts and instructors) are included. That puts it about in line with what a blue-collar manufacturing worker would have earned, way back when America had any of those, and pretty close to the median income in America right now. Even the “celebrity” professors (think Toni Morrison or Cornell West) may earn only in the low six-figures, which may seem like a lot until you stack it up against the $1.5 million+ your Division I football coach is likely to make.
We’re not even taking into account that most college professors can’t even begin their careers until relatively late because of all the extra schooling they go through. They’ve lived on next-to-nothing as graduate students or adjuncts for a decade or more by the time they manage to get their supposedly elite jobs. As a new professor, they’ll do well to service their student loan debt, much less go out an spring for a new Volvo. There are a lot more Toyota Corollas and Chevy Malibus in the faculty lot than Volvos. In fact, the students’ cars are often a lot nicer and newer than our own. And while it is true that I drive a Volvo, it’s an 18-year old Volvo with a rebuilt engine and 312,000 miles on the odometer, not exactly an elite ride.
We like our coffee black.
I have known professors who were taxi drivers and farmers, pool sharks and carpenters before they entered the hallowed halls of academe. I’ve known stay-at-home moms and navy men, engineers and restauranteurs who eventually climbed that ivory tower. In other words, we academic “elites” are a whole lot like everybody else, but through luck and hard work, but mostly through a deep love for the subjects we study and teach, we have managed to get into positions in which we can share our enthusiasm with our students. And that, in fact, may be why we tend to be more liberal than the population as a whole: the sense of duty and a certain idealism drive us to teach, and that carries over into the voting booth.
Why the British are obsessed with class is fairly obvious. Why Americans are not is troublesome. Sure, we wrote about it in the ‘20s and ‘30s: Fitzgerald channeled the great undercurrent of angst that ran through that heady era of stock market boom, and Steinbeck during the Great Depression? How could he not? It’s hard to stare down a soup line and pretend it doesn’t matter. But our lives and our experiences (excluding, perhaps, along racial lines) were, in fact, quite a bit more integrated then. The cheap apartments of the hired help lined the same blocks as the mansions they worked in. The Hoovervilles may have spread out on the outskirts of town, but you still had to drive past them if there was anywhere you wanted to go.
These days it’s the gated communities, the great, inane tracts of winding, cul-de-sac-ed exurban sprawl, that house the wealthy. The poor are safely condemned to cities or rural areas so far out that respectable people never have to drive there. The rich even have a term for these places: flyovers. Flyover states are the jet-set equivalent of flyover roads: the massive elevated highways beneath which the squalor of blue collar and service-industry housing looks distant and ghostly. Ironically, it is often the sales and property taxes of these less-well-off city dwellers that fund the ring roads the wealthy use to scoot out to their low-tax McMansions out in the county or the bedroom community over yonder.
Once there, in the rarefied air of the developments, the wealthy are supported by their own strip-mall infrastructure. Increasingly, corporate headquarters, like that of the Sprint long distance company in suburban Kansas City, have themselves fled the inner city, along with the churches that make our new bourgeoisie feel justified in living the life they live. These corporate office complexes are the sort of clean, well-lighted place at which the new wealthy would like to work, as brand new as can be, and utterly free from the reality of how those who built it, those who staff its lower echelons, and those who are forever excluded from it, themselves live.
The exurban experience, then, almost completely separates those who can afford it from everybody else. Our city-fleer may go weeks, months, even years piloting his massive SUV through yesterday’s farm field, only vaguely aware of what it used to be. He may go those weeks or years without ever knowingly meeting anyone of a different class: the corporate behavior codes are so well developed for those working his drive-thrus and gas stations as to make even the most desperate oh-so-helpful-and-friendly. Who can tell the suffering single mom and the laid-off machinist from anybody else? The poor, in other words, may as well not exist for homo exurbanis.
He may see the poor on the local news, I suppose, but then it will only be because of a killing or a fire that just reinforces his view that “those” people are utterly incapable of getting their act together. If, that is, he watches the news at all. With a million cable channels, why be bothered with the ugly reality of other people? There is bass fishing to watch or high-stakes poker all night long. If he’s really feeling curious, there’s always FoxNews for a version of the world he can agree with.
His environment won’t let him see the poor, and nor will his entertainments. Nobody is poor on TV. When there’s a minority, it’s Denzel Washington or else a pimp or drug dealer or hooker. That our po-mo bourgeoisie’s taste in legislation is of the “get tough on crime” variety should be no surprise.
Our separation from each other marks a separation from reality. Dropping the notion for a minute that those who are truly bad off should be our focus – the third world victims of AIDS and genocide and starvation – we can’t even see our own laid off, our own illiterate, our own working poor. How can we ever help if all we see, all we identify with, are the wealthy that populate our screens? And how can they see us as they cruise so far above?
from Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland
Where the “developers” see “a whole lot of nothing” I see ecosystems – swaths of green space, native grasses, stands of Osage orange, cover for coyotes and foxes, pheasant and wild turkey, the hunting grounds for hawks.
I’ve been an enemy of urban sprawl since, as a child, I saw the metastasizing city begin to encroach on my family’s own patch of God’s Own Earth, since I saw firsthand that “development” really meant “destruction.”
Not only is so-called development destructive, it isn’t even creative: the legions of strip malls and fast-food joints, of Wal-Marts and Home Depots, of uniform tract housing, no matter how supersized or upscale, vary little from exurban scenes in any other American city. We’re sacrificing perfectly good prairie for this? We’re dozing up and asphalting over perfectly good farmland for yet another overpriced yuppie steakhouse?
It’s senseless.
Owing to our lack of courage and gumption, we city dwellers, instead of fixing up our old neighborhoods, instead of hanging around and getting involved, instead of shopping local, just carve out our chunks of faux-frontier on the edge of town. We cannot see, of course, since the land doesn’t light up or have a fake-ass Mediterranean facade, that the ecosystem our new model home stands on was once home to actual life, life as valuable than our own – or more for being more rare.
We also don’t seem to grasp that our new subdivision is quiet because everything in it is dead. Neither do we grasp that, retailers being what they are, the city we just upscaled to escape will catch up in a matter of scant months if not weeks. This phenomenon is a failure of imagination nearly as large as that which brings us war. In the long run it does as much damage as war to the environment, to the psyche, to the fabric of human relations.
Sadly, history tells us that civilizations that live as we do, with wanton disregard for their surroundings, tend to collapse rather than reform. I see no indication that we are even aware of that history, much less likely to heed it.
Now that Jacques Derrida is dead, what the hell am I going to write about?