We on the right don’t like to use this little thing called a brain, because it’s too challenging–and we’re proud of that./Image: Licensed Adobe stock, Jakub Jirsak.
Greetings, Alt-reading lovers!
Once again, I, Doctor-Associate-Professor-Erstwhile-Airline-Pilot Ebeneezer Scorge, your guide here at Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW) to right-wing, but a lot of times unfortunately neutral or actively liberal, scholarship, studies, and superficial skimming. You’re just always in the library here at the Cask-of-Amontillado-ish-ly, familiar-to-an-Alt-er in their oppressive nature, basement-based offices of SYRW. And by the library, I mean low, sagging bookshelf with a few warped paperbacks frozen-in-domino-falling formation. But it’s a library, nonetheless!
A Hofstadter Matter
Aah–an old classic self-help manual, I see! Anti-Intellectualism In American Life by Richard Hofstadter, one of the greatest historians in…well, history! He and his treatises are so erudite, finely argued, and beautiful to behold, we on the right, of course, reject them like Dr. Ronny Jackson rejects help for his substance-related problems. We can’t discuss this book in any way but the most limited, for if we were to do that, our minds might be at risk of expansion, evolution, growth. And that’s the main thing threatening the perpetuation of our debased and dumb life-projects over here on the right wing of the political spectrum.
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We may, however, discuss one passage that I have memorized like Don Jr. has memorized the number of this stripper he met at Scores in Weehawken. I committed it to memory because it’s a lyrical lamentation, really, laying out the beginning of a rich, textured portrait of who is this creature called “the intellectual.” That’s important for us on the right to always have a fancy-ourselves-but-who-knows-if-we-are-purely-Teutonic-and-Germanic-white-race-knuckled death-grip on, because if we don’t, it may liberally-lessen the unavoidably ineluctable and always indubitable fact that we could never, ever be mistaken for being intelligent (though, like most people, we perceive that we are).
Ideas–They’re Not Our Thing
About the intellectual, as an abstract idea, Hofstadter writes: “He may live for ideas, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque…When one’s concern for ideas, no matter how dedicated and sincere, reduces them to the service of some central limited preconception or some wholly external end, intellect gets swallowed by fanaticism.” Honestly, even an Alt-simpleton like myself must take a moment to revel in the beyond-pleasing pulchritude and beatific bliss-inducing skill with which Hofstadter simply, elegantly makes an unassailable mini-argument, of which this chapter-opener is only the beginning.
We right-wingers are always up in zealous arms about something or other–and always a misguided, misled, misapprehended, miscommunicated, often mispronounced, something or other. Sometimes it’s getting fiery about our “right to guns;” sometimes it’s denouncing in the harshest possible terms “the Deep State;” sometimes it’s stomping our feet and folding our arms in petulance about how we shouldn’t have to pay taxes, because it reduces our monetary wealth, and both we and everyone else knows that that inherently empty and vacuous entity called money is all we have going for us.
Right now, of course, reacting-extremely to gun reform, our negative perception of “big government,” must take a back, further back. and in-the-truck seat to the one thing we must focus our missionary moxie on like Melania focuses her gaze on who-knows-what and never allow to waver from that, also like Melania just stares and stares, again, at it’s unclear what: President Donald J. Trump. For some reason that no one outside our trashy cultural crash-and-burn-y cliques can or wants to understand, we’ve sold our barely-there souls, our small minds, and our hard-to-take-as-it-was personalities to defending this orange man. And we’re going down with the big, orange ship, trust and believe.
As long as the facile, utilitarian, Trumpian political ends are more important to us than the challenging, analytical, political-philosophy-analyzing work of understanding what beliefs and leaders might actually help us get what we Alt-righters think we want, we’ll be decidedly anti-intellectual. In the Trump era, we say as much with as much and more resentment, defensiveness, and bluster as is necessary to make sure everyone knows we’re the proud members of the section of the country known as Idiot America, a coined by author Chalres P. Pierce. We despise the coastal, “cosmopolitan” elites, motivated by our self-saddening knowledge that we’ll never be educated or aware enough to be like them.
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The Life of the Mind After Trump
Once the loud, hideous, tweet-too-often S.S. Trump goes down, what’ll be left of our pathetic party and people–because we don’t actually have to follow the maritime ethic of the captain going down with his ship, given that it’s an ethic in the first place, and in imitation of Trump, we have no use for those. It would behoove us to figure reach out to our fellow citizens, even and especially those of communities that we think of us “not our self-constructed tribe” to figure out which political and cultural direction is best for (all of) us. However, if we were capable of probing analysis or critical thought, we wouldn’t be 24-Hours-a-Day-Fox News watchers, so all this reacing out and asking ourselves tough questions, Professor Scourge can guarantee you isn’t happening.
Even for someone who got his doctorate from Trump University before it’s financial and all-around nosedive into non-existence, it’s a huge-as-DJT’s-belly relief not to have to scan with my ocular orbs any more than the above excerpt from Hofstadter’s–or anyone else’s–book. As Hofstadter’s artfully advanced arguments make their inevitable home the shockingly underused gray matter that is my excuse for a brain, that unsettling feeling begins creeping down my body, almost like a shiver, a lightly electric shake-and-shimmy, named cognitive growth; cerebral plumping; and a Russia-Trump-collusion of the qualities of heightened perspicuity and increased logic-and-rationality. I know you’ve had this super-disturbing feeling, too, SYRW readers. It’s ok–you can tell Fake-Dr. Scourge.
Want, But Never Give In To the Want
As long as you never let it advance any further, it’s perfectly acceptable for an Alt-human’s brain to want to live, to grow, to thrive, to reach for the intracranial stars, to multiply like damning pieces of evidence in the Mueller probe. Just never, ever let it go any further than that inkling. While I say innocuous and weirdly comforting things like, “Another day, another dollar” and “I better get to workin’ hard or hardly workin” every 45 minutes or so, you keep reading with no intent to actually glean or retain any information, dear Alt-ers. I’ll look for the next verbal victuals to put a dumb-ass right-wing spin on and present to you to make a related, repetitive-on-this-site point.
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© 2018 Akbar Khan
