I Don't Know What You're Talking About

the politics of wtf

They’re not…from here? Or we’re not from there. Our “political” chasm is a massive breach in social mechanisms. It’s not a debate; it’s people living in mostly parallel worlds who have to interact in the awkward places where the different realities drift into collision. “This is a tangerine,” one says to the other, who wonders why someone is using that word to describe a lemur.

I’m traveling with Miss Teenager, who feels inclined to look at small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast despite her father’s heavy sighing. Admissions tours all use the words “robust” and “rigorous,” or forms thereof: Our robust sociology program is known for its exceptional academic rigor. The discussion is about the intensity, nay the ferocity, of the learning. At [Name Here] College, one engages fiercely with the deep questions of the age. We wrestle with intellectual problems. Also, the tour guides keep making Harry Potter references, the only specific literary reference they ever make, and bragging about their undergraduate research in queer poetry and environmental justice. So. In an art museum full of astonishing art donated by wealthy alumni — mostly wealthy alumnae, if you can name that college — I heard an older art history professor sigh heavily and mutter that students here used to be more academically inclined.

Now: different worlds.

As I sat in the waiting area of an admissions office this morning, a mom was urgently scrolling through her phone, calling out the stunning things she found there: In a shocking act of courage and righteous power, Senator Cory Booker held the floor in the United States Senate for an astonishing twenty-five hours, a devastating rebuke to that horrible man, the one whose name isn’t spoken. The admissions Q&A sessions with parents operate on that Rule of Not Saying It, while actually saying it: Yes, I wanted to ask, in light of all the things that are going on in our world, all the current attacks on the world of the intellect, and the way that Columbia, for example, recently capitulated to the…forces that we currently face, what is [Prestigious College] doing to stand up for our values?

And so the extremely brave senator, the mom called out this morning, said that he was making good trouble in order to redeem the soul of the country. She did the hand to the chest thing. So stunning. So brave. That man must be writhing in shame, today, after such a bold and powerful public denunciation.

My view, you can probably guess, is that Cory Booker masturbated in public for a long time, for no discernable purpose and to no significant effect, stitching together a bunch of midwit platitudes. Some clown jacked off in public — but anyway, is there a place around here where I can get a cup of coffee?

The performative focus, the endless signal signal signal of Longhouse status posturing, seems to come from a machine that produces the same product no matter what you feed it. I don’t disagree with any of it — I just don’t…uh….what? Cory Booker something something? I don’t get to the place where I can start arguing. I don’t have a different view of Cory Booker using the filibuster, because I have no view if it. It’s beneath viewing. And so it’s like we have societal ataxia, and the left and right side of the body have entirely lost coordination. Over and over again, I just squint: what? What does any of that mean?

I’ve never seen Glenn Greenwald descend that hard into persistent misspelling, so you can tell his brain was injured by the existence of this person. I attempted the pose, to see if it made me feel what Professor Stanley feels, but I think I did the finger spacing incorrectly:

Bad finger placement across the chin: not an intellectual. Is one also supposed to lightly part one’s lips? Unsure.

I find myself thinking that nothing is ever really different, and the names of things change without the forms of things changing all that much. I’m 3,000 miles away from my copy of Gone With the Wind, so pardon me if I don’t nail the reference, but IIRC, Scarlett felt that Ashley cut an aristocratic figure of the most exquisite refinement. Freed from labor by the labor of others, he perfected his engagement with the Higher Arts, as a shining example of a culture that was flawlessly balanced, like a Grecian urn. I thought of Ashley perfecting his mind while being freed from labor, yesterday, while I watched students at Vass— sorry, at a very prestigious college labor over their queer poetry in a dining hall where an old black woman pushed a cart full of dirty dishes, limping, with a heavy sigh. Like a Grecian urn, that place. The housekeeping staff and the groundskeeping staff and the dining hall staff allow us to focus on social justice.

My impression is that we have an aristocracy, of sorts, that has credentialed itself into being through performative gestures that identify members and exclude non-members. The discussion we’re currently pretending to have about our political course is an assault on, and a defense of, the bulwarks of a brand of class privilege founded in performance and signaling. The fact that so much of the discussion is about grant money is maybe a bit of a tell. So the subtext is all the content: Don’t take this away from me.

It’s a pleasant life, and it comes with good restaurants. I understand what they’re defending.

More later, as we grind on through Harry Potter references from our top emerging intellectuals.