Elite American youth

When I write "elite," I am referring to white kids who have gone to good universities, sometimes the Ivies, but also good state universities. They are, I believe, at the heart of the mobs that are currently protesting and, as I wrote in my previous post, have learned their hatred of American institutions from their professors. They are not the redneck-like protesters that were maligned by the press during the early days of lockdown. In fact, the photo above (in a recent issue of Book Forum), at a demonstration against Scott Walker a year ago, shows a young, buff, rather attractive male. I think he is recognizable as one of the elite white kids I am referring to. Were it not for the sign he holds above his head, one might guess he was a student at the University of Wisconsin, a very good university. I say U Wisconsin, because the political figure being protested by the sign was until 2019 the governor of Wisconsin. (Click to enlarge.)

What takes me aback is the sign about the young man's head. We know from it that he finds Scott Walker revolting, but his words reflect on him as well. Why would a well-bred young man be so vulgar? The vulgarity does not land on Walker; it lands on the young man. And why, when it is so easy to laugh at rednecks for their inelegant ways, does one not find this elite class equally offensive?

But most of all: What is with these young, privileged white males displaying themselves in all their vulgarity?

Photo credit: Mark Peterson Steidl/Redux Pictures

American self-hatred

This is an addendum to my previous post in which I mentioned the idealism of the college students I used to teach. The students were seriously interested in matters like:

-- What is the meaning of life?

-- Is there a God?

-- If there is a God, why are there bad things in the world?

These are questions that philosophers have thought about for millennia. Our earliest ancestors, even before they developed reading and writing, were concerned with these questions. It is a human thing. It was once the purpose of a humanities education to thrash these issues out with our students and to help them to understand the complexities of human existence. The advent of deconstruction did away with the need. Deconstruction informed students that anything that happened before them was evil, that their ancestors were bad people. They had not wisdom to offer. After all, look at how badly they did. They saw nothing good.

Interestingly, the United States is the only country in the world where this idea took hold. Despite the crimes perpetrated by Germany in the 20th century, you will find very few Germans, of the Left or the Right, who hate their country the way that Americans do.

Why this doctrine became prevalent among American academics is perplexing. The generation that spread it was among the best educated in American history. This generation first went to school in the 1950s, where they learned the 3 Rs, how to write a legible hand, and how to sit quietly at their desks. A small number of them went to college in the mid-1960s,  just when the universities were encouraging foreign-language education. Many like myself studied a foreign language and even studied abroad. In the early 1970s we entered the professions -- and turned around and began introducing the doctrine of deconstruction into the study of literature.

The literary works that these academics taught were part of what is called the "Western" literary tradition or the "Western canon." Most of the works, however, were by European writers, not (initially anyway) American ones. It was these works in which this generation of scholars had been trained. For instance, my dissertation was on the German writer Goethe (1749-1832). Was it perhaps because of a certain felt inferiority of Americans (vis à vis Europeans) that they began to undermine the Western canon of literature?