At one point in my cultural education I became interested in Bluegrass music. I came at it from an odd and arguably derivative direction in that the interest stemmed from hearing jazz/classical/Bluegrass fusion music sometimes called Spacegrass or Jazzgrass. I didn't understand many of the references or allusions until I studied the history and origins of such music. For example, the Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs tune "Don't Get Above Your Raisin'" baffled me. Above a rasin? What could that possibly mean? Then I noticed the apostrophe and the accent/language implications. Duh! "Don't get above your raising", be true to your class.

I'd never really thought about that before, but it is clearly a powerful influence in society. It's foundational to tribal loyalty, solidarity, class warfare, social and economic status, belonging and home. Those who reject their milk language and society are largely denied the pleasures of the hearth since they will never be fully accepted anywhere again.

The song title wasn't only about class loyalty since it has a direction vector: above. There's a kind of reverse snobbery that readily admits that the swells are rich and powerful, but not better in important ways. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, mocking the idea that the swells are in fact "above". Inexplicable behaviors such as "poor mouthing" - pretending to be a bit dumb, largely ignorant, unsophistcated in thought and deed, and impoverished - make some sense when seen from this perspective.

I deal with some of these flinty, razor sharp multi-millionaire bumpkins in my life and work. They may wear the exact same uniform of a blue chambray work shirt and jeans every day of their lives, drive utilitarian vehicles, and live in modest homes but they are not what they seem from surface appearances. When we talk about issues and projects there isn't much that I know or say that they don't understand and reason about in context. The parts that are new to them are focused on intensely and worked over for any intellectual nutrition that may be contained. Our language gradually shifts from bumpkin to high-bumpkin to a straight forward uninflected common speech as they focus the speed and power of their knowledge and intellect on interesting and possibly important subjects.

In some ways these people are much smarter and better educated than those who fake it the other way and pretend to be more than they are. In this sense their reverse snobbery is rational. They are smarter and do have a more functional stance. They don't make as many blunders or believe their own bullshit.

This isn't just cultural neeping. Contemplating the malaise noted in the previous post (and many others for a long time) reveals its relevance to our current problem set.

I think many people, even Sarah Palin’s devotees, might concede under pressure that having a President who has a strong baseline knowledge about the world, about American history, about economics, and so on, is a good thing. Not because we necessarily want an executive who is himself or herself a policy wonk, but because it lets that executive make more judicious choices about what policies to approve or reject. Many of the worst policy disasters under Bush the Lesser can demonstrably be traced back to the bedrock fact that he was easy for his courtiers to manipulate because he didn’t have an independent knowledge of his own on many issues, just a kind of personal appraisal of his staff that appeared to mostly revolve around obsequious loyalty.

The issue isn't knowledge or intelligence. The assumption that a willingness to wear the colors and flash the gang sign of self selected "elites" is a reliable signal of either knowledge or intelligence, much less wisdom, is mistaken. In many ways it is the reverse. Modesty and a willingness to consult are signs of greater real world knowledge and intellectual maturity. When we compare the policy disasters of Bush to those of his past and present opponents this becomes ever clearer. It is silly to expect a President to have useful knowledge of the details of governance. No matter how convincing the acting it is just an act. The real test is whether the President is sufficiently smart and intellectually mature to realize this, or if he makes the worst blunder of all and believes his own bullshit.

The problem is larger than just national politics. When we consider the blunders of the self selected "elites" in every facet of life over the past few decades we find similar failures of intellect, education and maturity. They hold fashionably nonsensical views, lack real knowledge of society, and fail to accept responsibility for the adverse consequences of their behavior. Rather than admitting their mistakes and learning from them, they rationalize and deny them, focusing solely on maintaining their false self images and the perquisites of power. It's always someone else's fault. It's sabotage by laggards. Their dreamy unrealistic notions never got a fair trial. They are like a UFO cult that comes down from the mountain when the mother ship fails to appear on schedule, still convinced that it is coming.

It seems to me that this is what is driving the Tea Party phenomenon, though this is merely a tentative hypothesis, not yet even a theory, a just-so story that may with further testing evolve into something with substance. As Obama is revealed as an empty suit, a pseudo-intellectual poser, and his supporters are shown to have been dupes and dreamers lacking insight or even knowledge of real societies, large numbers of people are turning away in disgust and seeking more rational alternatives. Among them are also those who are disillusioned with the very idea of large scale intrusive governments no matter what the composition of the ruling class.

This will not necessarily be an improvement. Disgust is a powerful emotion not easily overcome once it happens. Politicians, the media, and even scientists have now squandered their credibility and it will not be easily regained no matter how scrupulously correct their behavior might become if they truly grasped the issues and worked diligently to improve themselves. There are large scale problems and threats that require close attention and coordination of disparate smaller scale responses, but this seems improbable at this time due to those failures and loss of credibility.

I would be more hopeful if the supposedly educated classes demonstrated some comprehension. Rather than seeing Bush, Palin and other poor-mouthing luminaries (what a contradiction!) as affronts to their class they could demonstrate some education and intellect by realizing their significance and legitimacy. Whatever the personal deficiencies of such pretenders to power they have an arguably more rational approach to governance based on modesty and respect for the complexity of life, a complexity that grows exponentially as the scale of governance increases. They don't have the answers and don't claim to have them, but neither do the arrogant elites. Any partial, contingent, ephemeral answers that are to be found will result from collaboration and mutual respect rather than immature class conflict.