Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [57]
Book-haters, people who make fun of ballet and classical music, or ridicule people who use words longer than three syllables, are dangerous dumb animals as far as I’m concerned. My compassion and tolerance for them is about as deep and profound as theirs is for me. People who are stupid by choice deserve to be laughed at, ridiculed, and shamed into admitting their shortcomings, not lionized for being “real,” or somehow “genuine,” or anything “noble.” There is nothing noble about being stupid. Being ignorant—and proud of it—might make for soothing television drama, or a chest-beating seminar for jingoist op-ed writers, but it’s a devastating sociopolitical illusion that those who know better have an obligation to dispel.
Now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, educators have moved from anger and denial to acceptance. They are having to admit the failings of their own system, no matter the source of those failings, and put reading courses into their curriculums so that students are capable of advancement. And the students are eating it up. Nowhere is this more evident than at nonacademic learning centers, the best of which, in my very biased opinion, is The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Whenever they post a class in reading good books, plays, or poetry, it fills up instantly with otherwise educated professionals—people smart enough to know they’ve been denied, and that their popular culture has moved away from substantive discourse. At the AWP I heard it everywhere, in the conference rooms, down the corridors, in the bars. All are having great success offering classes in the basics of reading, comprehension, and, ultimately, encouraging their students to write. It is a giant step backward from the culture of our parents, but it is a necessary step forward if we are to save our society, our culture, our democracy.
Listening in on the panel discussions, lingering in the lounge, strolling the halls and exhibit hall, I tried not to think of the fate these gentle people and their counterparts in history receive at the hands of brutal regimes. When, I asked myself, will intellectuals band together and fight anti-intellectualism? At what point will they have had enough of the right-wing religious fanatics, and take them on by going past them to their constituencies? When, if ever, will there be an intellectual movement that is combative in its lionization of the mind?
If intellectuals don’t see the danger they’ve courted by allowing themselves to be herded into smaller and smaller communities, they will fall victim to the repetition of the very histories they teach in their classrooms: the book burnings, executions, censorship, and destruction many have seen with their own eyes. But although I rant and rave that these people need to train their considerable mental might at the hounds of idiocy who would defame and ridicule their work, I have to remind myself that these people aren’t warriors, they are thinkers; they aren’t killers, they’re poets. Can thinkers become warriors? Sure they can. Should they be warriors? Not in a perfect world, but perhaps in this imperfect one, yes—but warriors of the mind. I think they’ve got the message. Everywhere I turned at the AWP, I saw educators, writers, and professional articulators standing their ground. These days they are even willing to take you by the hand, sit you down, and teach you how to read, rather than expecting you to already know.
The conversation I was born into is a mad harangue. And that’s what a democracy should inspire. From inside it’s loud, scary, and weird. It is frustrating and infuriating because it feels so chaotic. But it isn’t chaos, not real chaos. Just once a person would like things to turn out right and orderly, but if that’s what you want, then fascism is for you. From outside a democracy looks weak and disorganized. Enemies have watched from without and misread what they see and hear, concluding that such discord is a sign of weakness. But it is a