"Egghead" is, leaving
out its derogatory coloring, a word for "a
person who is highly academic or studious" and that person is "often a professor or the protégé of a professor."
If
"egghead" fit me and my colleagues who taught English Composition it
meant keeping your writing unified and coherent and choosing specific words
over vague words. In argumentative compositions it emphatically meant
avoiding violations of logic. If anything like a Donald Trump speech
appeared before us it would have gotten a flat F.
Now it appears
that many of our white male protégés and even a few of our colleagues are
telling pollsters, by word or, more likely, by anonymously clicking a button,
that they intend to vote for Donald Trump.
It's the great unexplainable of
our academic lives, and nobody inside or outside of academia has been much help. In
the public forums I follow there are plenty of explanations for the
less-educated men's behavior but none, zero, for the well-educated men's.
When you're hard
up for explanations you explore the outer reaches and, spurred on by polls
showing Trump gaining ground, I have thought harder and harder about what it
might be in me and my colleagues that would allow an entry by somebody like Trump. And the only thing I found is almost too outré to report:
hatred of self-contradiction, the archetypical fault of the bad mind all teachers, but especially Composition and logic teachers, are trying to turn into the good mind.
"Impossible!"
you say. I do too. Who is more full of contradictions than Donald
Trump? You'd have to find a pretty objectionable case to compete with his
case.
To accept the one I found you'll have to accept, I'm afraid, my explanation of the action of Drew
Faust, president of Harvard, in denying scholarships and team captaincies to
any student (she was obviously pointing at men) who joined a single-sex club: that it was a blow in the war
between the sexes (Post 340) in which she held all the moral weapons. She and her fellows in the enlightened world were right every time they spoke about patriarchy. A white man had about as much power in moral suasion as a bare-fisted
pagan had in combat with a Roman soldier. Indeed, what women ruled at
that point amounted to a moral empire.
I see frustration,
and internal pressure building up. Testosterone maybe. And a man can't stand up and argue it away. Not in a public arena where
every spectator understands moral power, and knows who has it.
Furthermore, if he's an academic he's already got his reason, three-quarters
on the side of the feminists, keeping the lid on. Yet he's still a male
and can't help feeling those defeats as blows, lashes on a poor pagan's back.
With not a cry from him.
Finally, the salt
in the wound, he senses that Drew Faust knows her power and her position atop a
moral and intellectual empire. She's just doing this to rub in her sex's victory.
But that,
too, had to go without complaint in a Christian culture, where there's no credible objection to the kind of power she is employing, the power of the persecuted, the weak, the long-victimized. Who can object to power when it's used to hold a Christian to his obligation to love? There can't even be internal objection.
Except that objection to
contradiction. And when the cause of contradiction, that core fault of the bad mind, is love, a passion, it represents (oh
Milton) exactly what would take all mankind (in Adam) down: the victory of the passions over the reason. This kind of moral correctness is simply uncontrolled
love. It's sentimentality, emotion without intelligence.
And where did the eggheads see this contradiction? In those employing Drew Faust's kind of power and
working next to her, in race relations. They were rebuking white men for
language they freely accepted coming from black men. The N-word for
blacks, the B-word for women, outrageous in a white mouth, was OK in a black
mouth. "I ain't fucking with you, you bitch" lets the rapper, because his race is the victimized race, go
on to greater success while, in the middle of paragraphs of hedging and contextualizing, "there are issues of intrinsic differences of aptitude" [between men and women in science and engineering], gets the white man removed from his position (as president of Harvard, and Faust's predecessor — the justice of which removal I'm not questioning here).
The egghead has been living with these burrs in his underwear, correctness
burrs, this last one the worst, for years now. And he hasn't been able to cry
out. Then he sees a place that's not
public and where frustration and
outrage don't have to be suppressed, a polling booth. There he will, as
the surveys show, fill in the circle for Donald Trump. He will be saying
to Drew Faust, who's name is to him now legion,
I ain't fuckin'
with you
You little, you
little dumb ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you
I got a million
trillion things I'd rather fuckin' do
Than
to be fuckin' with you.
