“I think he looks at the world through, his mom, who was a school teacher, and his dad, who was a physicist or something like that.” “He can’t relate to a guy like me. He can’t relate to a guy whose dad worked all his life.” “If we’re gonna call one side bigoted, we probably gotta look at the other side and say the same thing.” – Rick Sanchez.
Never mind the Elders of Zion stuff. He doesn’t quite lay it out plainly, but Rick Sanchez comes pretty close to expressing some of the stupidity behind the reasons our news media are, in Jon Stewart’s words, “hurting America,” and why uneducated Americans are constantly voting against their self-interest.
First, is the residual working-class resentment / sense of superiority against intellectuals: Sanchez’ dad worked; Stewart’s didn’t because he was just a “physicist or something like that.”
Second, there is the assumption that having been raised among educated people has robbed Stewart of the ability to understand people who are not like him.
Finally comes the assumption that there are two and only two sides to everything, and that it is some sort of law of nature that the two sides are exactly equal and opposite.
Together, they form a closed mental system – I will not call it intellectual, because it sorts without evaluating – that provides poor people with the means to oppress themselves and the media with an excuse to keep hurting America.
There is nothing condescending to the credo I was taught that “all work has dignity,” although the frequent obiter dictum, “even ditch-digging,” carries both a warning against class prejudice and an assumption of one. Sanchez is the one carrying the heavy class prejudice here. Funny because, of course, it is only his own education which put him in the chair at CNN where, presumably, he felt he did some work.
Less well-educated people have probably always salved their sense of inferiority by believing that intellectuals may have knowledge, but lack common sense. Think of George Wallace and his remark about “pointy-headed intellectuals who cain’t park a bicycle straight.” But Sanchez and his ilk have transformed this relatively harmless palliative: education is no longer just a sign of possible dearth of common sense, it is now a guarantee of the inability to understand anything.
Anti-intellectualism has become widespread among uneducated people in America, and feeds right-wing foolishness. When Congressman Paul Broun says that “human induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community,” uneducated people nod sagely. ‘Yes’, they say to themselves, ‘those scientists are constantly trying to hoax me, but I’m too smart for them.’
Sanchez and Broun exemplify the result of the commodification and professionalization of education in America. It used to be that a citizen acquired a liberal education – in any subject, whether physics or English literature – in order to learn how to understand anything and everything better, using one particular subject matter. From the ability to reproduce and measure an hypothesis under experimental conditions to analyzing and evaluating the weight of the evidence, we learned good old Anglo-American empiricism. From this ability to think, one could go on to become a better teacher, writer, business manager, administrator or journalist. In other words, education gave you the ability to ask any question and the tools with which to answer it.
Not anymore. Education is to get you a well-paid job, period. Do English lit majors get paid a lot? No? Well, then you’re stupid to study it. How about physicists? Not really? Dummy. And so, as a stupid dummy who went to college, your education actually proves that you understand less than uneducated people. The cold fact is that everyone is just out for themselves, so of course scientists – and for all I know, English lit majors – are always trying to perpetrate hoaxes which will make them rich. It’s just obvious.
Facts have become a matter of belief. ‘Some people believe the world is round, some don’t. So I guess we’ll never know.’ Journalists were always at the low end of the empirical scale: find two independent sources who say it’s so and write it up before the deadline. But now, they have fallen completely off the scale. Sanchez’ belief that, ‘If we’re gonna call one side something, we probably gotta look at the other side and say the same thing,’ expresses a belief and today’s journalistic professional credo, not a fact based in anything beyond faith. He wants to succeed as a journalist. He doesn’t give a damn about keeping citizens informed of their interests in a democratic republic. All that’s cool with his fellow journalists. He just should have left the Jews out of it.
