Re: intellekshuals

Yeah, I'd say that's probably accurate of America at large. Even these days
the idea of an "elite" class of people defined by "special knowledge of a
subject" disturbs even those in academia -- guilt ridden, they feel the need
to apologize for their chosen professions.

It's just that the idea that someone may know more than most other people
about something is so....undemocratic.

You don't mind this from your doctor. You're paying him or her to keep you
healthy and save your life when you're not. Or your mechanic -- you're paying
him to keep your car on the road. But an academic? What do you get from
Them? :).

Directly, that is.

Jim

Scottie Bowman wrote:

> 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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