I’ve noticed a general rejection of intellectual elitism in the past several years. Leftist intellectualism is probably one of the last ruling classes from the old world. First went the Kings and Queens, along with nobility in general. With the advent of capitalism, we have seen commoners become wealthy. Some people are still born into wealth, but most earn it. Lastly, the intellectual elitists are getting hit. Being intelligent is impressive, no question about that. It takes hard work to earn a degree. But that doesn’t make you superior, nor does it make your ideas more important than another’s.

Some comments on other posts:

“My greatest fear is not that Kerry will win fair and square it is that people will vote for him just to shut up the likes of John Clayton and because they are afraid of the Bushhaters.”

They can intimidate Bush supporters who make themselves public, but they can’t touch them in the voting booths. If anything, this attitude will encourage Bush supporters to go out and vote.

“Then Kerry can blather 24/7 for 4 years, the voters of this country will learn a hard and fast lesson. Jacking of the jaws will not alleviate the pain from an attack on a weak, ineffectual and effimate presidency.”

Agreed. Kerry has shown that he prefers to react to terrorism, instead of being proactive (like Bush). That means nothing will happen until there has been another terrorist attack on our soil. Not acceptable, not by any means. Bush will take the fight to the terrorists because it is the only way to deal with people bent on destroying you. That’s why my vote goes to Bush.

One of the things that amazed me in the late sixties was how many of my fellow MIT students would read pretty heavy fiction lit for relaxation.

By the time we got to college we usually had gone thorugh all the classic Science Fiction and had to drop back to “old” stuff My father had Analog Science magazine from about 1947 (when he got back from the Pacific). I read Asimov, Herbert, Niven, Anderson, and many others in the original magazine form in my high school summers. When I went to college, I couldn’t find a sci fi that I hadn’t already read so I went classical.

MIT was also worried about churning our “soul-less” engineers so it had a strong emphasis on lit courses. I’ll bet I took more lit than a lit major took science.

Great ideas are not that for which one reads them. Iíve never read a piece of fiction by Roger L. Simon. I visit here sometimes because he does have interesting ideas & intelligent commentary.

I’m only here because I know that someday Roger’s going to post a hot picture of Gina Gershon touching up her lip gloss in a Prague cafe. Keep hope alive!

Yes, if you look up UBL’s declaration of war on America from the mid-90s, you’ll see that it is specifically addressed to William Perry, Clinton’s Secretary of Defense at the time. Just google the phrase, “killing and neck-smiting”.

As for writers’ opinions on the election, I like what Thomas Carlyle said back in the 19th Century: “Between vague, wavering capability and fixed, indubitable performance, what a difference!” From Sartor Resartus. Go Bush!

Exactly so! I am going to lead a three week session on “the Legend of the Grand Inquistor from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karmazov at church. I wonder how many of our sample of writers could discuss the elements of turbulant flow in large high speed underwater objects?

They often go by the common feeling of the milieu to which they aspire. They often go to extremes. The milieu used to be more diverse, thatís all. In the USA, almost all the writers & poets are left-wingers. The artist can be evil, & evil-minded. And be an artist. Amiri Baraka, who wrote plenty of artistically fine work in the past (The Dead Lecturer, Tales, The System of Danteís Inferno, etc.), is a Stalinist black racist hatemonger unrivalled. Ezra Pound was a naif with a vicious intellect, an anti-Semitic fascist whose friends & connections saved him from execution for treason (broadcasting for the fascists during WWII) by getting him permanently committed to a lunatic asylum. He remained friends with the Jewish Leninist poet Louis Zukofsky. Jean Genet advocated evil as being beautiful & wrote to make the reader feel it, wrote of an airplaneís being intentionally crashed into suburban home as a beautiful event, & Sartre called him a saint. Conceivably, without his muse of evil, Genet would never have been such a good writer. Anyway, sociopathy & misanthropy have been very ìin.î

Contrary to recurrent notions, art is about neither the unique nor the universal. Itís about universes & about kinds & qualities of things. An artist gets caught up in his favored universe(s) of discourse, his favored modalities & gamuts, & the kinds of feelings which he develops & masters there. Universes & gamuts & musical keys. Kinds & qualities of feeling. Herd animals. The artist often understands about as much as he needs in order to understand the effects in which people feel certain ways, sometimes subtle ways. Itís not anything like a scientific critical effort — an effort to know on what basis you know something rather than to understand in what effect you feel something. The result is artistically cultivated but otherwise often mis-educated passion. Even fascist & money-crank Ezra Pound said itóall the ìgreat ideasî of the great writers & poets would fit on the back of a postage stamp. Great ideas are not that for which one reads them. Iíve never read a piece of fiction by Roger L. Simon. I visit here sometimes because he does have interesting ideas & intelligent commentary.

Itís probably no coincidence that the sanest-sounding Kerry-backer among Slateís polled novelists is John Updike, one of the USAís most overrated novelists, Mr. Glitterature & NYT Book Review darling with his sophomoric anthropomorphismsóìthe faucet dripped rusty tearsîó& his cluttery cleverness & elevator music for intellectuals, serving a home-decorative function not so unlike that of the NY Times itself.

I’d also like to point out that people are reading less and less fiction. The LLL say it’s because americans are stooooopid. I think it’s because the publishing establishment is not working for us.