“And I am dumb to tell the hanging man How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.”
I wholly agree with Mr. Kimball and Mr. Nyquist. And though I may fit the description of the mass man a little to tightly, in fact, I reject the facile shelter of egalitarian brotherhood.
Certainly the reason I come to sites like these and read essays beyond my education stems not from a pretension of thinking myself a peer, but to intellectually arm myself for the future. I require elites not sneer at them. Most people working in the traditional professions including; Medical, law, the military and education are or should be such elites, why else should I bother with them? My very life depends on elites!
Should I be disturbed at the coarseness and ghettoizing of speech, dress and style I witness from my peers? Or is Reverend Wright’s anti-American rants becoming merely common currency in the ever evolving dialectic?
“… Paul Johnson, the British historian, who wrote: “Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today.” What he should have said, but failed to clarify, was that today’s “intellectuals” are frauds; they are mass men,”
One only needs to read how Journalism has fallen to the depths of propaganda to affirm his insight.
The Internet may be a sort of Pandora’s box stoking rather than merely providing the tender for a new totalitarianism, is it 1938 again? Ironically I happen to live in a craftsman house built in 1938. Though I surround myself with philosophy, literature and art I still find myself (from habit) harnessed to stupidity of the television.
This I agree: My generation is the mass man, mass-produced and mass processed through an ever-expanding bureaucracy of conformity, masquerading as social justice and egalitarian.
But this is why I bother to read Mr. Kimball or Mr. Nyquist; in order to remake myself. To develop from a mass man to becoming un-dependent and eventually a freely independent thinking man, though time seemingly is fading into a dark future I am still (by a little) mass man but with a satellite feed.
“And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.”
Dylan Thomas
