Years of Poems and Spirits

Tonight’s SNL started with a skit that poked fun at media’s adoration of Obama. It was really fun.

The media’s adoration for Obama is almost naked. Yet everyone in the business carries on as if nothing is wrong. There has been so much talk about media giving the Bush administration a pass prior to the Iraqi War. But by my count, that wasn’t as bad as what I see today. This behavior not only tarnishes the profession, but also does disservice to the candidates and the public.

Therefore, it is great to watch the skit where the media was made fun of. This skit also reminded me of an article I read in New Yorker many years ago, “Standup Guys“.

Before, I thought political comedy as an inherently liberal expression. But that article really changed my mind. Political humor is not about liberalism versus conservatism. It is about the powerless versus the powerful. In other words, political humor lives to expose the poseur of the powerful, particularly the elaborate symbols and rituals created by those in power. To put it simply, it is the little boy that is destined to cry “but the Emporer has no cloth!”

In a liberal society as the U.S., the powerful doesn’t have to be the authorities. It could be the masses (a la de Tocqueville). Unfortunately, even as the message conveyed in a joke is actually true, it is only effective when packaged in humor.

Is this a case of tyranny of lie or impotence of truth?

NYT introduced a couple of recent books (“Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge”)on America’s anti-intellectual tradition.

Quotes:
Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”

The article also cited Ms. Jacoby (started as a Washington Post reporter) as saying the problem was with the flawed educational system and religious foundamentalism.

I disagree. This is just another manifestation of the knowledge-power relationship. Or the ontology of knowledge: if people already feeling empowered, why do they still need knowledge?

This may seem obvious, but my contention is: this is NOT an abnormly, nor a unique phenomenon.

Recently, something happened in business school that made my head spinning…

As the Chinese New Year draws near, students in B School planned to organize a China-themed Friday party. One student from Taiwan was quite insistent about displaying ROC’s flag. That motion caused quite a disturbance among students from Mainland. As part of that gang, I witnessed outbursts of pretty strong feelings.

I thought about preaching my brand of tolerance but thought the better of it. What made me wonder (not the in-disbelief kind, but the courious one) is, even people from Mainland having been living closely with those from Taiwan, this experience did not really change their attitude much, if at all. I mean we studied, worked, lunched, teamed, and partied together. If anything, I believe most of us feel the two sides are closer–however involuntary–than each with the non-Chinese crowd. Yet that is still not enough to cause some of them to rethink how ridiculous it is to go back to a relationship that we didn’t initiate nor appreciate. In other words, the hatred and distrust between the two side was started by our grandparents. They may have geniune reasons to do so, but we can never truly appreciate this geniuneness since we never lived through that period.

(A related point is that how Chinese government handles Taiwan’s status is rather short-sighted. I always wanted to write an essay that is titled “Defeating a State, Losing a Nation”)

It is just another example of impossibility of “truth”. If one is blind to her own experience but rather fall for something others planted in her mind and internalize it, what does that experience matter? Ironically, someone organized a panel and having a group of students who spent three month in China, in an exchange program tailored for foreigners, to discuss the future of the country. I thought she put way too much weight on that three-month.

Of course, there are always exceptions. Like John Walker Lindh, whose short stint with another culture suddenly made him a complete convert. But that is why there are mental institutions. For most of us, we are likely to carry our little world around us–wherever we go.