Who got paid, and who got screwed?
Susie Madrak posted a great piece Tuesday over at her highly excellent blog Suburban Guerrilla in which she responds to the Where Are All the Girls bullshit that's got everyone's knickers in such a twist lately. [Also see here and here and here, if you're interested.]
Rather than trying to figure out whether it's due to some kind of insidious gender discrimination, or because women are socialized to be less opinionated or competitive or whatever, Susie poses what I think is a better question:
"Everyone's asking why there aren't more women pundits. I say, why aren't there more working-class voices like mine, male or female? Will that voice die when Jimmy Breslin does?"It's part of the media culture (and especially so on the left, she argues) to give more authority to those who have a credential from an authorized institution, while relegating everybody else to the wackjob fringe. And, I would emphasize, dismissing their concerns as trivial or self-serving. Without implying that such things are useless, she notes that academic credentials and prestigious connections don't automatically grant the ability to see what is going on and to describe it to an audience:
"You don't have to be an economist, an attorney or a political consultant to know what's going on in this country. I mean, that kind of background is always nice, but for a political knife fight, it's unnecessary. You don't need charts and graphs to know what the Republican party has done to America - and what they plan to do. All you have to do is look around.I couldn't agree more, though I would add: "and who the hell paid them to do it?"
"Who got paid, and who got screwed?
"You don't even need to know which specific policies got us into this mess. All you need to know is, who pushed them?"
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2 comments:
This is something I've been talking about forever. I actually like Ivy League kids fine, most of the time, but they have a limited perspective, and both in the media and the Democratic Party they're too influential. (And the worst of them are arrogant little shits, of course).
Not only does this give the Democrats a blind spot twoard certain issues and demographic groups, but I also believe that academic traditions of politeness make academics less capable of dealing with the gutter politics that has always been part of the game. "We can't sink to their level -- I'd rather lose than do that -- winning isn't everything". I've actually heard people say that, and one of Kerry's people came pretty close to that.
I also think that credentialed people tend to be more into management and routine than into opportunism and enterprise. And sorry, but in politics you need opportunism, inventiveness, enterprise, and even dirty tricks.
John Emerson
Seeing the Forest emeritus
I went around and around on this with Ezra Klein. I think that one of the big areas that politics, policy, punditry are missing is the ability of non-careerists to add value other than as foot soldiers. In fact, I've advocated that mid-career people have a lot of valuable experience that is ignored in favor of the forever-involved wealth-subsidized Ivy Leaguers. (Full disclosure -- I have a BA and a JD from high-prestige east coast schools.)
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