September 26th 2008
Watcher’s Winners – Meltdown Edition
T
he Glistening Eye drafted a mighty fine post this week on the economic meltdown called Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There. The Watcher’s Council liked it and voted it to the top of our selection in this week’s contest. Among the questions he asks:
What sort of regulations and reforms will be proposed? What is likely to be enacted into law? Would any of them have been likely to prevent the situation that’s unfolding?
For answers, he turns to Voltaire. Check it out. Is the blogosphere creative, or what?
Coming in second was The Razor’s A Lack of Clarity, which was not about Wall Street or the election, but about trying to identify the fine line between a life worth living and a life that no longer is. I loved it.
So without the lines, without the clarity that they bring we are left to weigh in the end, what she would want us to do. This is what the Wife is doing as she carries the burden of making the decisions for her mother’s care. All I can do is listen to her, agree with her opinions and rub her back as she unloads the burden for a few minutes.
Her mother doesn’t know it but she is in the best of hands.
On the non-Council side, a post I wrote a lot about (here, here, here) but didn’t vote for won, The Jawa Report’s Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated “Grassroots” Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them.
My pick for first came in second – Victor Davis Hanson’s Palin and Obama: What Really Is Wisdom? I was raised to think that the rarefied international, educated world of diplomats, journalists and professors was the only intelligent and worthwhile world, and I held onto that belief until my early 30s when the facts of living my life simply overwhelmed it, so I deeply identified with writing like this:
Let me be a bit more specific still and indulge a bit from what I saw of these two worlds. I spent nine years as an undergraduate and graduate student — three at UC Santa Cruz, four at Stanford University, and two in Athens, Greece. In that near decade, I met all sorts of supposedly brilliant professors, undergraduates, and graduate students in the humanities — Ivy-League Ph.Ds, whiz-kids with Oxford and Cambridge degrees, Rhodes Scholars, famous archaeologists, accomplished classicists and historians, well-know humanities scholars, and Oxbridge Dons with landmark books on history and philology. In addition, the last five years I have worked at Stanford again, and often have met another array of brilliant entrepreneurs, in fields as diverse as finance, law, medicine, engineering, and computers.
I contrast all this with growing up my first 18 years in southwestern Fresno County on a 120-acre tree and vine farm, where for most of my life I knew only neighbors who worked the soil, and survived the tough environment of the local schools. And then once again from age 26 to my mid-forties, I farmed as well as taught, and so I had a good idea of what the highly educated did during the day, and what the farmers and small businesspeople did on weekends and late afternoons.
Two conclusions I drew from all of this. While civilization advances on the shoulders of the educated, it is carried along by the legs of the muscular classes. And the latter are not there by some magical IQ test or a natural filtering process that separates the wheat from the chaff, but rather by either birth, or, as often, by their preference for action and the physical world.
Second, I have seen no difference in intelligence levels between those who inhabit the world of the physical and those who cultivate the life of the mind. That is, the most brilliant Greek philologists seemed no more impressive in their aptitude than the fellow who could take apart the transmission of an old Italian Oliver tractor, fix it, and put it back together — without a manual. And I knew three or four who could. The inept mechanic seemed no more dull than the showy graduate student who could not distinguish an articular infinitive from an accusative of respect.
For all the winners – and to find out how my entry, Obama’s Bizarre List Of 40 “Probing” NYT Stories placed – go to the new Watcher of Weasels site and check it out. And as a bonus, you’ll get a stellar quote that we all hope will be proved true by what’s going on today in Washington.
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