Super Tuesday Edition......in which I recount a conversation over some beers.

Yesterday afternoon I was relaxing with my neighbors Mickey and Seth.  Mickey's an older gent, a retired machinest with lank dingy hair and at least one white T-shirt.  Seth's a Lutheran minister.  We were drinking beer and discussing politics on Mickey's patio.

"I can't believe he might actually win," Seth said over the top of his mug of homebrew -- it's always BYOB on Mickey's patio.  "He's making a mockery of this whole thing, you know, and he's still probably going to get nominated.  And he might win the whole thing."

"Who?" Mickey asked around a Camel Light.  "Trump?"

"Yes, Trump," Seth answered. 

Mickey looked nonplussed.  I drank some beer and watched. 

"Doesn't that bother you?" Seth pressed. 

Mickey shrugged.  He crushed out his cigarette and wrenched another tallboy of Miller Lite from the six-holed plastic dolphin killer.

Seth looked annoyed.  "Well," he said, "at least it's not my party.  I guess I should be glad that Trump is wrecking the Republicans.  It makes it easier on us in November."  I could tell he didn't mean it.  Seth votes Democrat because he's a good liberal whose heart bleeds in all the right places, but he likes the give and take of the two-party system.  He likes Republicans.  He was drinking with two at the moment.

In any case, it didn't phase Mickey.  He slowly opened his tallboy and lit another Camel.  He exhaled a cloud of smoke.  "Problem with Trump ain't Trump," he said.

"Say again?" Seth asked.

"The problem with Trump ain't Trump."

Seth looked at me for clarification.  I shrugged.  Heaven only knows where Mickey might be going when he first starts in. 

"How do you figure that?" Seth asked.  "The guy's a blowhard.  He's rude, unqualified, astoundingly ignorant of policy issues for a guy running for president.  He's a rac-"  Here he stopped and fixed me with a look; he reads my blog.  "He's a bigot, at least," he continued.  "This morning he refused to denounce David Duke.  Did you guys see that?  He's turned your debates into sensationalized wrestling matches.  He's turned the entire Muslim world -- practically the entire world outside America -- against him with the stuff he's said.  How can you say he's not a problem?"

Seth looked at both of us for an answer.  I wasn't going  to undertake it, since it was Mickey's assertion, but while Mickey was thinking I did point out that Putin seemed to think Trump was alright.  Mickey grinned.  He was ready to talk.

"Yeah," he said, "Trump's a show.  The man's been a show for thirty something years.  We all know that, and we knew that going in.  But I said 6 months ago that he's great for American politics, and I stand by it.  He cuts through the B.S. and calls a spade a spade.  Sometimes he's wrong, but he's never dishonest, except when he's lying.  And he lies honest too, not like Hillary.  She lies dishonest, because she expects you to believe her.  Trump doesn't care.  In a way, he's even honest about his own ignorance if you listen careful enough.  That's why the media can't get enough of him.  He's good T.V. and he undermines, as you say, the whole political game.  But that's good.  We've needed somebody to take a wrecking ball to Washington culture for a long time.  He's not a problem."

Mickey took a drag and a swig while Seth and I tried to get our heads around what he said.  After a minute, Seth asked, "So what then is the problem?  I assume you think there's a problem?"

"Sure, there's a problem," Mickey said.  "The problem is that we're no longer capable of self-government.  Dennis Miller said it months ago on O'Reilly:  We're a nation of ignorant, narcissistic celebrity whores, drunk on the delusion of entitlement and high on pop-culture.  We're hardly the sort of people capable of seriously going to the polls and choosing a leader of the free world.  How many people that are voting this fall, you reckon, have read a book this year?  Hell, this five years?  Since high school?  You think any of them have any clue what's in the Constitution?  I'm not talking about having read it; I'm talking about having any vague idea beyond the first two amendments what is actually in the document.  Miller was right.  Only thing is, when he first said that, he thought it meant we were stuck with Hillary.  He didn't realize there was a bigger full of crap icon coming down the pipe. Trump is the perfect man for our time.  Just like always, we will get what we choose.  Neat thing about America, ain't it?  Our government is a reflection of our people.  So, no, Trump's not the problem.  The electorate is the problem.  They're mistaking the prophet who points out the problems for the messiah that's going to solve them.  You'd think they hadn't just made that mistake eight short years ago."      

I watched Seth.  He was processing.  He seemed to make his peace with what Mickey said and took a drink.  Suddenly he looked a little self-satisfied.  "Well, that makes sense, I suppose," he said.  "I guess you could say you guys had it coming.  I read an article in The Atlantic the other day that argued it was the Conservative populism that created Trump.  All the anger and alarmism of talk radio and Fox News, you know, producing a populist electorate that is irrationally fed up with the establishment and willing to follow anyone so long as he's pledged to tearing it apart."

"Mm-hmm," Mickey said.  "I read it, but don't get too smug and comfortable in your ivory lawn chair over their, preacher.  You guys got your own internecine problems brewing.  Don't be too sure that Bernie Sanders isn't your Sarah Palin."

Seth was taken aback.  "What?" he laughed.  "Do you seriously mean to equate Sanders' millenials with....with..."

"The angry mob?" Mickey finished for him.  "Teabaggers?" 

That was unfair.  Seth, being a man of God, had never used that particular pejorative. 

Mickey went on.  "You're damned right I do.  Only thing is, like Trump, the Tea Party is honest.  Bernie's college kids don't even know how ignorant they are.  Come on, Seth.  I know you lefties like to stick to your own news networks, but surely you've seen some of the clips of undergrads supporting Sanders who can't even define Socialism.  These kids are sheep.  They're not critical thinkers.  And speaking of critical thinkers, did you see the polling results on the African-American vote in South Carolina?  Clinton won 87% of that bloc.  You know who wins 87% of the vote?  Iranian presidents.  Militaristic totalitarian dictators.  I don't know what's going on with the African-American Democrats in South Carolina, and I'm not going to guess -- God knows you guys think I'm racist enough as it is -- but I'll tell you who doesn't vote 87% on one candidate:  an informed and free thinking populace of any kind whose results aren't monkeyed with at the polling station.  So don't lecture me about the conservative 'monster' like you ain't got one of your own.  The Democratic primary doesn't have anything more right about it than the Republican one does.  You guys just don't get as much news because you don't have as loud a 'carnival barker' on your side." 

Seth didn't have a response to that.  Neither did I, really.  All in all, it seemed about right to me.  Most of it, anyway.  Seth looked at us each in turn, then he asked Mickey, "But you're not voting for Trump?"

Mickey's Camel was in his mouth while he was wrenching free another tallboy, so he had to speak around it.  "Hell no.  Not in the primary.  Probably vote for Rubio.  Not that he has much of a chance."

Seth turned to me.  "You?"

"Rubio," I nodded.

Seth took a drink.  "Well, I suppose I'm in the same boat as you gents.  I'm feeling the Bern.  But unlike the millenials you refer to, Mickey, I can define socialism, and I think that Bernie's version of it is right for America.  I only regret I'll probably have to vote for a watered down version of it in the general.  What about you guys?  Will you vote for Trump in the general?"

We both nodded.  Seth looked perplexed and shot Mickey an indignant question.  "What about all you just said about Trump and what's wrong with the electorate?"

Mickey grinned -- or maybe it was a grimace.  "Well," he said, "despite the grim prospect presented by a Clinton-Trump election, you still got to go with the lesser of evils.  I trust Trump more than I do Hillary with the Supreme Court appointments, and I do think he'll fix the V.A. -- Hillary hates vets.  And besides," Mickey said, "when he lies, he lies honest."
 

........in which I talk about King Arthur's Court and welders.

A few months back, Marco Rubio made a comment about the country needing more welders than philosophers.  This made most every philosopher I know pretty upset, and social media seemed to explode (insofar as philosophers possess the demographic capital to make anything explode) with mass protest about how important philosophy is to society, how educational programs in philosophy are indeed conducive to an economically productive future, and how philosophers are disproportionately rich and good-looking with rapier wits.  O.K., I made that last part up, but it wasn't too much an exaggeration of the hullaballoo. 

 

Lost in all of this angst was the welders.  Perhaps because they were on the complimented side of Rubio's comment.  I think it more likely they lacked the luxury of time and means to fritter away their day hunting down links to statistics that validated their wages and existence and which they could post on Facebook with a "Ha-Ha, Marco Rubio."  Whatever the case, I want in today's post to give the welders -- and their ilk; what I think Rubio was intending to connote with the term was anybody who works in a manual labor profession and produces or services material goods as their vocation -- a little of the attention they didn't get in the Rubio flap.

 

Two things at the outset:  1) I'm not concerned at all here with the economics of profession, the usefulness of degrees, or any of the implied politics of Marco Rubio.  Those things concern me as a person, but not here.  2) I do not mean at all to denigrate philosophy.  The examined life is terribly important.  Anyone who knows me will tell you that I spend, if anything, too much time in examination of both my life and life in general.  Philosophy is probably more important to the human race than welding, as such.  We got along for a few thousand years without welding; rudimentary philosophy has been around since Adam first wondered what he was doing here.  So please, philosophers, withhold your ire.  I'm not against you.  In fact, what I would like to do in what remains is to philosophically consider the welder.

 

In a passage in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the title character Hank Morgan (The Boss) takes a moment off from his drilling King Arthur in how to act like a commoner to consider the difference between the life of the King and the life of the commoner.  The King, of course, is an intellectual (loosely speaking) and the commoner a member of the working class.  I'd like to quote the passage in its entirety.

 

"There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about 'the working classes,' and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay.  Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one but haven't tried the other.  But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pick-axe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down -- and I will be satisfied too.

Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and its own highest reward.  The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him -- why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same.  The law of work does seem utterly unfair -- but there it is, and nothing can change it:  the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also."

There's a lot in that little passage:  the gulf of separation of the intellectual ruling class from the working class, the injustice that the most rewarding professions pay the most money too, and the line of B.S. that hard intellectual work more or less equates to hard physical work.  (Think about that last one for just a minute:  It doesn't take you too terribly long to realize that nobody has ever been or will ever be sentenced to 20 years in Siberia working out Sudoku puzzles.)  I'd like to briefly consider each of these three things in turn, and at the end of it all, hopefully we'll appreciate the welders -- and machinists, excavators, janitors, garbage men, dishwashers, road crew, landscapers, etc. -- a little bit more than we're used to.  You'll notice I left farmers out of that list.  I did that on purpose.  I'll come back to it.

First, Twain noted that the intelligentsia in his day pretty much didn't get the working classes.  He knows this because they say that hard intellectual work is as hard -- or harder - than hard manual labor.  And, as Hank points out, it's not.  Not in any way.  Like Hank, I've done both.  I've worked hard at both, insofar as working hard means putting in a great deal of earnest energy in order to accomplish a task.  But there's a difference, that can easily be illustrated by two different experiences with summer jobs.  During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I laid railroad track to earn money for school.  I spend 8+ hours a day manually hauling around heavy, creosote soaked ties and driving railroad spikes.  It was hot, miserable, and dirty.  What made it bearable was that I knew it was temporary.  Like Hank, I don't think there's money in the world that would have made it doable as a vocation....for me; obviously, it was a vocation for a number of the guys I worked with.  Fast forward not quite 15 summers, and I spend my "vacation" between academic years at Thiel College writing a detective novel.  I put just as much effort and probably nearly as much time into the novel as I put into laying track, but..... well, let me illustrate this with a story:  I wrote most of the novel on our front porch, because, like Twain, I like to smoke cigars when I write, and my wife won't let me smoke in the house.  Employing the "if you give a mouse a cookie" logic, when I smoke, I like to have a beverage.  So most afternoons found me at the bistro table on our porch with a laptop, a beer, and a cigar......working.  One day, a man from the window company came by to give us an estimate on replacing our front windows.  The short of it is that it was too high, and we were in the midst of declining when he indicated my beer, cigar, and laptop on the bistro table and said,  "Well, if your husband was spending his days working......" 

He was being funny, of course, but he was also dispensing some true homespun wisdom, which is that to those who actually work, intellectual work isn't work at all.*  Sure, those of us in the philosophic fields of academia might whine all the time about how much we aren't paid, but that's exactly to the point; we do what we do anyway, because we like it.  I didn't see a penny from the novel, which still languishes in unpublished obscurity, but I can't wait for this summer to start so I can do it again, even if for the same pay.  Conversely, I wouldn't drive spikes again all summer for half again as much pay.

Of course, academics are sort of the exception to the rule.  As Hank Morgan noted in his day -- and it's worse now -- usually one is paid more the less his job requires him to actually work.  Don't get me wrong, he may put in the time.  Lawyers, for instance, famously never see their families, but they never break a sweat either, unless the building's air conditioning goes out, and I'd bet any one of them their savings account that they wouldn't trade positions and work an assembly line if the respective salaries were switched.  And there's something of an injustice in that.  For much manual labor, the pay is the only reward, so it seems to me it should be larger proportionately.  It'll never happen, the market being what it is, but I'd kind of like to see a bus driver paid more than a hedge fund manager.

We do have a sector of the ruling class in our country who purportedly are dedicated to helping rectify some of that injustice.  Predominantly, that's the Democrats.  Of course, there are other planks in their platform, but, traditionally, in my lifetime at least, the Democrats have been a party dedicated to adjusting things so that the economic situation of the working class is more equitable with that of the white collared "worker."  And don't get me wrong, I think that many of them actually mean well.  Some of them, of course, are simply Machiavellian villains pandering to folks they consider their intellectual inferiors in the interest of swindling their votes so that they can remain in power.  But many are also probably well meaning.  But even the well meaning ones have a problem, which is that many of them have never really worked, themselves.  I offer exhibit "A" above and to the right.  I get that he's not dressed for the job, but that man is clearly not used to swinging a pickaxe.  He looks more likely to fall down than make any real progress on getting a sizeable hole.  This, by the way, is one of the guys that I think genuinely feels like helping a worker, but I don't think he gets their lives at all.  It is, of course, not just Democrats who have become experientially separated from the working classes.  A lot of us have.  Many upscale urbanites in our country probably go cradle to grave anymore without ever having a good healthy backache brought on by spending all day working.

And there's something problematic about that.  A lot of somethings, probably.  Doubtless, we can't fix them all today, but one thing we can do is learn to appreciate the welder in our midst.  In Twain's novel, the bogey was the aristocracy, a bloated, lazy class that, though they added nothing to society in actuality, received all the respect.  I wouldn't at all equate present day philosophers with the medieval aristocracy -- nor any of the intellectual professions as such.  I would equate celebrities.**  And professional athletes.  These folks have earned neither their bloated*** salaries nor the respect that we lavish on them as a culture.  Rivet drivers have, conversely, earned much more than we pay them, and certainly more respect than we give them.

A follow up on farmers.  I excluded them from the manual professions as such because, as Twain describes the working classes, they are people who work only for their pay, i.e. non-intellectual, not rewarding in their own right.  That doesn't describe the farmer.  Farming is an intellectual trade, and an autonomous one.  Farmers don't punch a clock.  They're their own bosses (when the bank doesn't own them), and their trade requires intellect.  In some senses, they are every bit as artistic as the fiddler or the painter, working the canvas of flora and fauna and producing something beautiful (and often times tasty).  Which isn't to say that they don't work hard.  One might say that, from a perspective, farming is the perfect vocation.  A farmer understands more of the fusion of hard work and wit and even homespun philosophy than pretty much anybody.  When you throw in the fact that they keep you fed, you can't help but come to the conclusion that they're more important and deserving of respect than even welders, to say nothing of the Kardashians.


*A similar anecdote also illustrates this.  Once at a Foo Fighters concert I attended, Dave Grohl came out for the encore with a guitar and a can of Miller High Life.  The folks in the front started chanting, "Chug it!"  Grohl fixed them with a stare and said, "Chug it?  I'm working right now."  'Nuf said. 

**It really is a social evil that the Kardashians are a thing. 

***Bloated like a tick gets bloated when it's been on a horse for three days, all puffy and grey and nasty. 

........ in which I comment on the perils of free college.

First off, my apologies to readers.  I've been out for a few weeks, and I've no doubt you've been at a loss for what to do with those 15-20 minutes you otherwise would have wasted reading the Tuesday Blog.  I can only plead the demands of a paper deadline.  I'll try not to let it happen again.

Second off, despite the title and its obvious reference to a key plank in Bernie Sanders' political platform.  This is not really a political post.  Nor is it an indictment of Bernie, per se.  I actually like Bernie.  I think his rabid socialism probably comes from a good place, and given the utter chaos of the Republican primaries right now, I may well vote for Bernie in the Virginia primary, since the one thing I can be politically sure of at this moment in time is that I don't want Hillary Clinton to be president.  I'm getting to feel that way about the Donald and Ted Cruz too.  Oddly enough, some political quiz I linked to through Facebook tells me I should like Ted and the Donald, and maybe I do agree with them on political positions, but the Donald seems to me just a little too ignorant and a little too volatile, and Ted feels awfully oily.  I mean seriously, I would not purchase an automobile from that man at any price.  Do I want him for my president?  Thanks, Ted, I'll walk.  But enough politics.  Let's talk about college.

My worry about free college has little to do with the economics of paying for it as a society -- well, that's not entirely true; I worry much about that, but I'll let the economists hash out that issue -- what I'm worried about is the destruction of what is left of the academic integrity of the American public college and university system.  See, we already tremendously undervalue a college education here in the good old U.S. of A., and I can't help but think that reducing the material economic value (i.e. the price tag) of that education to $0 will lead us as a culture to undervalue it even further.  Let me be clear:  I am speaking of the undervaluing of college education (the actual intellectual content and practices learned in college) as distinct from a college degree or the college "experience."  Those latter two are actually overvalued in weird sort of zero-sum relation to the actual education.  I speak from the experience of a person who has been teaching English classes to college students for getting close to 20 years, and my experience tells me this:  free college will damage higher education by exacerbating what is already a problem in our culture's attitudes towards college as a whole.  That attitude is largely already a prevailing assumption that college is a time free of responsibility and authority figures; a time for finding oneself, not in Socrates or Charles Dickens, but in Natty Light and Trojan condoms; and a time at the end of which -- all of the "living" notwithstanding -- one is entitled to a degree that will lead to unreasonably gainful employment.  I don't see how free college won't make all of this worse.*

The truth of the matter is that our current generation of college students was raised by parents whose impressions of what college should be like were disproportionately influenced by the movie Animal House.  That fact that these parents' understanding of the college experience is centered in ideas of Bacchanalian revelry is testified to by the fantasy portrayed in the 2003 hit, Old School about going back to college to escape the responsibilities of adulthood (yes, hard as it is to believe, Beanie's baby, the very one who so often needed "earmuffs" is coming up on college age about now).  And this is the parents of our current university generation.  To say nothing of the students.  Parents, moreover, often try to recreate the good experiences they had in life for their kids. This seems particularly true for college.  Numerous conversations held between Phil, Claire and Haley Dunphy (TV's Modern Family) during the episodes surrounding Haley's short-lived college career illustrate this fact:  modern parents expect some level of debauchery and rampant irresponsibility to be at the center of their kids' college experience.  Learning anything, not so much.  A degree, most definitely, but it need not necessarily tie to their cherubs having taken anything away from those four years in their proverbial noggins.  

At this point, I realize I'm probably sounding like an old Puritan curmudgeon.  That is unintentional.  I don't mean here to rail against college immorality.  Lord knows that I enjoyed a good Dionysian rant during my graduate school years, as far as (and sometimes a little beyond) what my moral compass would allow.  I don't begrudge any measure of fun to college students now, but what I do mean to say is that there's a certain zero sum measure of time and energy in college, and we have already overbalanced that ledger on the side of partying down.  One of the few things that probably restrains the revelry is a lack of cash.  It stands to reason that not having to pay any tuition leaves more money in students' pockets to spend on beer, movies, shopping, etc.  One thing about the activities of going to class and doing your homework:  they're free.  Yes, I'm implying that being broke is an effective goad for spending one's time wisely in university.  Incidentally, this video gives an idea of how those in college now view the experience.  You'll notice that there is very little that is considered inherent to college that has to do with learning anything.

There's another thing about free college that is troubling, and that is the dilution of the academic gene pool that would undoubtedly accompany it.  I realize this is a classist argument, but it's true, for all that.  College isn't for everybody.  It's higher education; academic conversations in specialized fields are carried on at an advanced level, a level to which not everyone is intellectually equipped to contribute and in which, quite frankly, not everyone is interested.  I do realize that the issue here is economic, so the assumption might be that the gatekeeping function exercised by tuition is going to keep out the poor and not the ignorant or the stupid not intellectually prepared, but I don't think it's that simple.  We have scholarship programs for those who are intellectually but not economically equipped -- scholarships that should perhaps be expanded so that those truly qualified and interested aren't left out.  Opening the floodgates is quite simply going to dilute the pool and make it harder to get something truly academic out of college.  Think about it.  We have gifted programs at the K-12 level precisely because those at an advanced level of intellectual achievement cannot learn optimally in a classroom geared towards remediation.**  Do we really want that in college?x  Are we going to have university gifted programs?  

Lastly, I think that making college free would exacerbate the sense of degree entitlement that is already being felt by a number of American college students.  Now this might seem counterintuitive, since the entitlement a lot of students currently feel is articulated something like this:  "Hey, I paid good money for this degree" [implied: the professors better pass me and with the grade I want, because I paid for it, right?].  One might think that removing the price tag would remove the argument, but I don't think that would actually happen.  The rationale that Bernie argues for when pimping free college is that a college education is an American right.  We agree to educate all citizens K-12 because we at some point agreed that it was necessary preparation, and our people have a right to it.  He now argues that since a college education is necessary for a good job, it is our responsibility to provide it, and receiving it is a student's right.  Sorry, I said that wrong.  A college degree is necessary, and therefore a right and our responsibility.  If you don't think the latter (degree) is the way students (and their parents) are going to hear that promise, then I've numerous bridges and a high quality Mexican wall to sell you.  And that's why I think removing the price tag will make the sense of entitlement to a degree worse than it already is.  Because the degree will become, quite literally, a government entitlement.  This could do very bad things to the average college classroom.

Again, I don't mean to disparage Bernie Sanders, exactly, in writing this.  I do think the old guy genuinely wants to help people, and I think his free college offer is in that vein.  But I think there's a massive chance of unintended consequences here.  Consider:  the analogy he's making is that public college will be like public school, K-12.  Isn't it widely agreed upon that the majority of the nations' public schools are a disaster?  Wouldn't that logically follow in college?  I do buy the argument that the old public school logic says that we should be responsible for educating a populace with whatever they need pursuant to getting a decent job, but rather than putting everyone through college, how's about we stop requiring a college degree for things that don't need it and, for Pete's sake, stop stigmatizing people that don't have a degree.  It doesn't mean they're stupid or incapable.  It means that they didn't find Socrates and Dickens and Freud all that compelling of a thing to spend their time and money on for 4+ years.  That strikes me as a better idea.

Well, there's more I could say on this, and probably more that I should've said in the interest of avoiding overstatement and making nuanced qualifications, but it's after 9pm on the East Coast.  Many of my readers will be enjoying this, not with coffee, but with a shot of nightcap.  Speaking of which, it's high time for me to knock off and put my own higher education to good use by watching a little TV.

*In full disclosure, most everything that I'm saying about college here is radically not true of the college at which I am currently teaching, but finding an experience where the education was paramount, for me, required taking a job at a microscopically small Christian liberal arts college that primarily admits the best and brightest of America's home-schooled kids.  The atmosphere is something of a cross between America in the '50s and Oxford circa 1450.  It's not typical.

**We actually already have a lot of remediation in college.  Particularly at public colleges, especially community colleges, an alarming number of freshman have to start their college writing courses at the Basic Writing level, which, at many schools, does not actually even merit college credit.  They have to pass out of that and into the introductory freshman writing class.