intellekshuals

    An irrelevancy, I guess, but hasn't there always been just as long
    a tradition of hostility to the academic/intellectual world in America
    as in England? I'd have thought the Yanks - through Melville,
    Whitman, Twain, Hem, Jerome - have all looked on college boys
    with a mixture of suspicion & disdain. Bellow, I suppose, is
    a recent, modish (& very modest) exception. Wilson is the only
    ivy-encrusted bloke I can think of whom Americans trusted with
    the presidency - & wouldn't he be regarded as a Utopianist failure?

    In contrast to the situation in say, France or Germany,
    it's hard to find a place in the American national stereotypes
    for the Intellectual.

    And in England, of course, we value them only as comic figures
    of harmless eccentricity.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Wed Aug 28 03:19:52 2002