"Normalize" is the common name for what we
Americans now have to do in our thinking about Donald Trump. It makes me think about how English
Composition is taught in our colleges.
"Nothing works if your reader doesn't trust you," says the
teacher, "and an educated reader doesn't just give you his trust; you've
got to earn it. What you write for
him (or her) has to stand up under critical examination."
A President of the United States can't help being a
teacher, and I don't have to tell my readers what Trump will be teaching the
young. Not just that it's OK to
grope women but that what their English teachers tell them is all wrong.
"Don't worry about critical examination. They'll believe it because you tell them." I don't want that normalized.
You'll know I'm not making Trump's message too
extreme when you remember his claims that the concept of global warming was
created by and for the Chinese, that President Obama's birth certificate is a computer-generated
forgery, and that police are now being shot at record levels. When that got lapped up "critical
examination" went out the window.
Why were we teachers so shocked? Trump was speaking to uneducated
readers. For them critical
examination is always out the window. The shock must have come from the fact that more than a few
of the uneducated held college degrees.
Critical thinking has a good name with everybody but
not everybody understands that it comes down to just reading and writing well,
what's taught in schools, and not just colleges. Think hard enough
about what you're trying to say and what somebody else is saying to you
and you win the compliment. How
else? Not by meditations in your
closet.
We believed that so easily and for so long that we
forgot, until this election came along, how important the concept of "an
educated person" was to it. Sure,
we knew that smart orators could lead lazy listeners around by the nose, but we
expected to see them blush later.
If they didn't we thought we could make them blush. First it was, "That's not
grown-up" then it was, "That's not educated," or, end of the
line, the blunt "That's wrong-headed." Blushes show that the ideal of the educated person is still
alive.
That backward-looking English teachers are now
hyper-alert for blush possibilities won't surprise anybody. Nor that they are often disappointed. Look at a Trump crowd. Not a blush in sight, with none
foreseeable. And there are college
graduates there.
I am suspicious of broad explanations but I have one
here. It begins with our ability
to say, "That's wrong-headed."
And it requires a historical eye to see that in time, in more and more
American universities, you couldn't have a wrong head, or be said to have
one.
If you bore the marks of a handicap, for example,
your head was off limits. That was
first. Then if you bore other
marks, of deprivation, of persecution, of poverty, of deep disadvantage, of a
tragic history. Good people honored
those marks and were honored for their honoring. In the university showcase the educated person began to be
replaced by the good person.
Can that kind of replacement ever be a bad
thing? Yes, exactly in what we're
talking about, the university.
And, I would say, eventually in the nation as a whole. Eventually because in the short term
goodness can so often have a legitimate lease.
It can't have a long lease because it can't make the
decisions that keep a democracy going.
The uneducated, whom I see as children, cannot do that. Democracies have to be run by
grown-ups. Who can discipline
children. With the approval of the
other grown-ups. Otherwise the
children, assured of their own goodness, will be making decisions, and
decisions made by the simply good, we certainly ought to know by now, can be
terribly wrong. You've got to use
your head, and have the right kind, an educated head.
I think down deep we all know this but we have
trouble doing what our knowledge requires of us. And I think that in America it's harder than in other places
because our founding required a faith that can't help endangering our
maintenance: faith in "the common man." That is, the voter.
And to build up that faith and keep it going we had to praise and praise
him.
So in our country the common man joins the deprived
and persecuted as somebody very hard to call wrong-headed, though we all should
know that such people have to be as capable of wrong-headedness as
anybody. (If we think they aren't,
aren't we're bigots, condescending to lesser breeds? No, wrong-headedness has to be open to all, without respect
to race, creed, class, or color.)
So there's the common man now, voting commonness
into the highest office. And we're
feeling the ties around our tongues.
We want to say that, even if he has a diploma on the wall, it's his
defects, his low thrill threshold, his susceptibility to factless persuasion,
his easily triggered outrage, that are killing us. "Your head's on wrong." But that's a slur, and destructive of the faith we need.
So, do we give up trying to make him blush? Give up on the model we matched him
against, hoping for a blush? Give
up on the ideal of the educated person?
Right now we face stronger inducements to give up
than we have ever faced in our country's history. If for four years we keep using bad names for the man the
wrong-headed elected, making him out as some sort of abnormality, we could so
bitterly alienate his followers that we could endanger the democratic polity that
supports us all. Better by far to
treat him as normal. Within the
range, anyway.
But, God help us, we can't treat wrong-headedness as
normal. We teachers can't give up
our ability to get a blush, to make lazy or resisting heads turn. We can't give up on the ideal of an
educated person.
And that presents us with a towering challenge in
tact, in diplomacy, in verbal agility, in all pragmatic maneuver. Add what it will require in the way of
intellectual discipline and internal fortification and the challenge appears to
me as great, in its way, as any we have ever faced in war. We've got to normalize Trump without
normalizing anything he stands for.
That's necessary, but viewed day to day it looks
impossible. Acting as if a
head's on right while knowing that it's on wrong? Protecting it from injury while wanting to injure it with
words? Going along with the
uneducated while hanging on to your ideal of education? Saying uncritical things about them
while thinking critically? It's
too much to ask, America, of your citizens, the ordinary citizens your Thomas
Jefferson counted on to become educated, and extraordinary, and extraordinarily
helpful.
So that's the challenge, to do more than anybody has
a right to ask you to do. Except,
maybe, Thomas Jefferson.
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