Once upon a time I didn't know I could write.
For a long time, I accepted the notion that I was nothing more than a math, music, science, logic geek. It's a convenient kind of half-brained approach to a certain kind of sub-genius that in suburban circles had a self-sustaining credibility. Was I good in math? Yes. Did I like Star Trek? Yes. Bach preludes and fugues? Computers? Mensa Puzzles? All that and Catholic too. Hell, I even enjoyed Roger's Version. So now you get the stereotype.
Naturally, I overcompensated. Having gotten my scientific training out of the way, I started reading Moliere and Yukio Mishima, jogging on the beach and subscribing to the Threepenny Review. And I eventually got myself an English major for a girlfriend, and followed all things academic. But like many things in life, all was not it was cracked up to be. I finally convinced myself that I wasn't really that far off from the totality of reality and became satisfied that while I could probably play the role of a true Renaissance Man it was just another conceit, as was, astonishingly the intellectual prowess of academia itself.
It doesn't take much to recognize in the sciences that extraordinarily brilliant engineers who aren't actually complete social misfits don't hang around campuses to teach thermodynamics to undergrads - they work for NASA and build spaceships. But somehow I didn't see that in the Liberal Arts. I thought that the purest, most brilliant actually did stick around college towns and faculty rooms. What was I thinking? All of this came to me in a flash when I attended a conference at MIT with 75% of my academic heroes in attendance. I stood up and told them about the internet as a revolutionary way to get their knowledge out to the people, and they told me I was smoking crack. That was 1992.
I have come to a more refined understanding for the premises and purposes of academia and no longer suffer delusions about their supposed monopoly on intelligence, solutions or all the other goodness and light that their catalogs promise high school graduates, donors and the rest of us. They work their parcel.
But there is a special space, or so it seems, for the public intellectual. That special individual who can bridge the gaps between the specialists and the laymen holds our imagination. Whether they be in the military, like Hackworth or in medicine like Oliver Sacks or in the sciences like Carl Sagan, we Americans have a soft spot for the guy who can come on TV or write a best seller and make us all a bit more hip to what the truly edumacated know. After all, just like a leg is a leg, and a healthy body can be led up Mt Everest by the right Sherpa, a brain is a brain and can contain God's own truth. All we need is a patient medium.
Except that academics write to be paid.
Writing to be paid is something I find rather strange. I understand how it works in the software industry - because if I don't tell the computer what to do, it ain't gonna do jack. I'm a translator, and translators are always valuable. But everybody deserves to know the truth don't they? I mean, what if Jesus charged for the Sermon on the Mount? What if Issac Newton decided to patent his system of Physics and charge you to look up formulae, like Lexis-Nexis? I often tell the story of this party in Ft Greene at which I met a dreadlocked brother who held the floor and got the high fives by explaining how he had triumphed over the rich white man by flunking his dumbass, spoiled kids. They who had spent their entire upbringing comporting themselves to be in his class had no idea that a black man could control their lives. He was more intelligent than they were, he had more power than they did. He never let them forget it. He had climbed the academic tower of power, and had earned the right to toss a few lightning bolts. The way of the industry.
Me, I was and am an amateur. Or to put it more crudely, I like the sound of my own voice. And if it helps just one other person, then it's all worth it. Considering the five years I've been blogging, I could have been a pretty decent pianist by now. And yet, having discovered that I can actually write well, after all those years, I can't shake the compulsion. These paragraphs give me great pleasure. Still.
And yet in pursuit of the glory of the mantle of a great public intellectual some academics deign it their destiny to come down from the tower and speak truth to power or some such psuedo-noble calling. And at this point, in the voice of the man behind the curtain formerly known as the Great and Powerful Oz, with no more brains than you have my good man, they pump up the volume behind the love of their own voices.
Except that some of us ain't hearin' it.
All of this wending and winding comes to this point which marks the huffy and ungraceful exit of one Melissa Harris-Lacewell from The Root. One half of the tag team 'Down from the Tower', MHL threw around several highminded opinions in the common vernacular on a variety of issues. Unfortunately, MHL has taken the sort of zero-tolerance policy towards her fellow writers that sounds almost virtuous until you recognize the sort of postmodern word-battles going on. Specifically, she has accused my boy Jimi Izrael of being essentially an unrelenting misogynist. Which, is I suppose, the penultimate insult. Actually, to be more correct about it she called his work unrelentingly misogynist, which is even worse. That is, if you care to take such an unsubstantiated charge seriously from somebody who can't bother to quote one full sentence of his, much less a paragraph.
It started interestingly enough about family court and child support. I happened to jump into that discussion too. It ended up getting personal. Jimi had the nerve to suggest that men shouldn't be thrown in jail for falling behind on child support payments if women aren't subject to similar criminalization. As you might expect from a Feminist who finds Hillary Clinton too soft on such matters, Jimi was in for a shitstorm. But if you know Izrael's work like I do then you've been down this road before. The man writes with big black boots and has no compunction about stomping bugs, or what bugs him. There is nothing better that describes him than his current tagline, hard but fair. A writer of such creative nuance is worthless if he's not insightful, but on sexual politics among other things, the man has an eagle's eye and a lion's courage. That's the kind of writer that makes for an excellent public intellectual if you ask me.
Instead of jousting toe to toe, the academic retreats in a huff finding no overwhelming support or outrage from her editors at The Root, who obviously have a better eye for talent than concern for what dainty folks consider a 'hostile environment'. I think MHL has thrown up her hands and said 'No Mas' after only one round. Ahh but such is to be expected from Lefty academics who lecture undergraduates into intellectual cowardice with their post-modern faux egalitarian drivel. Any world where 'hoodrat lolitas' cannot exist, where lesbians cannot be poked fun at, and where adults can't handle the vile epithet of 'Missy', yeah well that's a world I wouldn't pay admission for. Parents of Temple University students, consider yourself warned.
Out here in our dirty world where writers who write for the love of turning a phrase (whew "hoodrat lolita", that's a classic) those who write to be paid and lord it over defenseless undergraduates are outmatched. So I'm afraid MHL will have to scurry back up her tower and find comfort up where the coffee is not quite so hot, black and strong. And if she, or others of her dainty persuasion, deign to slog it out in the blogosphere in battles of wits... well, bring a gun, bring a knife, bring a fisted glove or simply some high-falutin' metaphors. But don't punk out so easily.
I suspect, as does The Undercover Black Man, that she doth protest for a living, and couldn't sing solo out in the open without a chorus of sycophants. I further suspect, as my conservative spidey senses are telling me, that she's going to try some sucker punching. No doubt Izrael will become part of her tale of woe and oppression. Sheesh. I guess this is what peer review does to people who can't consider tough, fair black male writers their peers.
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