Sunrise Century

The Tea Party's still on my mind.  I think I'll define it as a revolt of contempt against the visible elites.  Those visible seem to encompass pretty much anybody who has any position of influence, a very few conservative standouts excepted. These elites have assumed authority for themselves, their purpose being aggrandisement of self and class; their attitude towards all those not themselves, contempt.

The marvellous thing about contempt is that it's always mutual, and what's happened with the spiteful over-reach of the last two years is that Americans have now seen that contempt.  There's no longer any effective pretense of "for the children", it's "take it and shove it".  The contempt so clear, contempt's returned.  The conceptual underpinning for the Tea Party revolt is Constitutional limited government, but the energy, the anger, hopefully the staying power, is contempt for those who have appointed themselves masters over those who merely wish to be left alone to live their lives.

The significant thing is the contempt.  Any rebellion merely based on concepts or policy differences can be co-opted, but you can't co-opt contempt; once it's formed it's not going to leave.  This is why this movement may last a generation.  It's class-warfare, where class is not economics but attitude, and each hates the other.  How good how good is that!  And the class now newly despised can not change, their self-identification depends on their need to have a class to which they can feel superior.  Lose that contempt for that class, lose all sense of self-worth.  But it's been noted now, and once noted it can't leave, so the war is on and there will be resolution.  --When I say the elites can't change I mean of course individuals.  The class itself, over time, can change because new blood can enter; and as well, those silent and marginalized, with this new citizen support may now find voice, and thus can somewhat mitigate the tone of the class as a whole.

I'm immensely hopeful.  The intellectuals of the West have made themselves trash, but the intellectual heritage of the West is immense.  The current class has made itself negligible through an inflated ego-separation from that past, defining themselves as superior by defining the past as insignificant.  Their entire production has been "new".  It has to assiduously be new, other wise it will lap with the past and that past will be seen as superior.  But the past was true, so necessarily all that is new must be false, that's why it's crap.  There is no wholesome American who does not see that, because all those wholesome have a sense of the true (even if not an expertize).  This is why the esteem socially granted the elites will be like the legitimacy granted authoritarian government: at some point everybody finally recognizes they agree each with the other: This government is filthy rotten to the core; and at that moment authority disappears, government falls.  Splat!  Exactly this will happen to what passes now for our present high culture.  Perhaps in a year we can get rid of a century of "Piss Christ".

We'll see.  But if there is collapse we're not then in a hole.  We're not the Soviet Union.  We're the West, especially, we're America.  There is so much powerful that can be drawn on from the past.  We can be students again!  Get rid of the disease and in short order health might again blossom.  I see this as a possibility.  This may be a sunrise.

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A good article on the same theme, which though not considering the psychological underpinnings, well states the poor training given our elites as to those philosophies and values that make possible such a democratic experiment as America.  Last paragraph summation:

Those who doubt that the failings of higher education in America have political consequences need only reflect on the quality of progressive commentary on the tea party movement. Our universities have produced two generations of highly educated people who seem unable to recognize the spirited defense of fundamental American principles, even when it takes place for more than a year and a half right in front of their noses.

That defense of course is of limited constitutional government, and in general of those values that classically have been understood to produce the virtuous self-regulating citizen.

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Is there any value in a snippet that comes in a moment but has no sense of a poem behind it?

Out of the woods but
Still in the meadow
On it will go how long?

Have you ever tried to scan a line
With Albaquerque
in it?

Both could be manufactured into poems; the first is about escape, the second about nothing (though suggesting something funny).  Each could be made complete.  But with no sense of a larger poem already behind either, would the result be worth the candle?  Maybe I'll try it as an experiment.  ...I've tried a number more lines on the first.  They're all silly.  It seems that if there's no poem right off there's no poem at all.

Tomorrow I will consider how many men it takes to start a cultural revolution.