20100720.2215

As part of the assessment of student learning my school is conducting, I have been directed to have students in my remedial reading classes summarize an article from the New York Times. Being fond of Internet searches and of making things fairly easy for myself, I looked to the online component of that outlet, and because I spend a lot of time looking at peoples' opinions, I plumbed the op-ed section of it for the article.

As it happened, I came up with Stephen Marche's "Byrd and the Bard," posted July 2, 2010, to NYTimes.com. In summary, the article laments the passing of West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, with the sadness coming not so much from the loss of his support for policies as from the loss of his command of Shakespeare. Marche notes of Byrd that "he was the greatest Shakespeare-quoter in American political history," displaying an impressive command of the plays attributed to the Swan of Avon.* His ready employment of Shakespearean phrasing, coupled with his reliance on Scripture and the Constitution, marked him as belonging to an older ideal of social and political life. With his passing, the hold of that life upon the prevailing American consciousness is much reduced.

Having not ever been to, much less lived in or been registered to vote in, West Virginia, I am not personally invested in the death of the Senator. But I am very much interested in some of the comments Marche makes in his paean for Byrd. One such comment is that "Quoting Shakespeare is risky as a rhetorical strategy. No American politician today wants to seem too educated."

The idea that there can even be such a thing as "too educated" is abhorrent to me--though that is to be expected, given that I am an educator and continue to pursue my own education. But it does dovetail with some assertions made by John McWhorter in Doing Our Own Thing, namely that there has been an anti-intellectual tendency in the United States (akin to the anti-authoritarian one that is often celebrated) since its inception. And, having been the "brainy" kid in my childhood, I know that the rejection of those who are "too smart" starts early.

My students, when we talked about the article tonight, had comments about the notion (I know because I asked them). One asserted that appearing too intelligent could lead to an increased workload. The ideas behind that are that being smart provokes anger (prompting additional, punitive assignments), suggests that the smart person has leisure (because learning isn't "real work," and those who have time to sit around and read have time to do more work), or implies that the smart person is more capable (a compliment, yes, but a dangerous one). Another student suggested that appearing too educated removes a politician from being able to relate to the ostensible constituency (I am paraphrasing), most of whom belong to lower socio-economic strata and are therefore not likely possessed of higher education--or at least, not higher education in the humanities. Display of higher learning therefore, in that student's assessment, prompts alienation--and that is detrimental to continued political careers.

I am always happy when my students make sense, though I cannot say that I am pleased by the truth of what they say.

Another comment of Marche's with which I have some ado regards Byrd's "deepest anachronism...he believed in a community of language rather than images." I have only tenuous guesses as to what Marche means by the terms he uses--what is a "community of language," really, or the suggested "community of images?" But I am not convinced that we have yet turned wholly away from language. We (for varying values of "we") remain very much text-based, though the nature of what constitutes text is more overtly in flux now than it has been for most of human history. We still speak to one another, if in increasingly short units of meaning. And while we do see much more recently than in the preceding few decades of images--pictures and the like--appearing within what would otherwise be "simple" texts, at no point have we fully turned away from the image as a carrier of meaning and cultural referent. The first printer in the English language, Caxton, printed woodcut illustrations with some of his works, manuscripts from centuries before him are treasured as much for the beauty of their drawings and paintings as for the language and script, and there are ancient forms of writing that are themselves series of pictures; even from the earliest instances of recorded language, the image has been integral to meaning.

I do not think that the two terms are as diametrically opposed as Marche constructs them as being. Nor am I quite convinced that we no longer exist as a community of language--inasmuch as we ever have been "a community" rather than several communities. The clamors for and attempts to legislate English-only policies in the United States, as well as the counter-assertions that people have rights to their own languages, speak to a continued awareness of the influence of language upon identity. So, too, do various native and indigenous language movements.

And thus, Mr. Marche, while I empathize with the loss by West Virginia and the United States Senate of a man who had at his fingertips the words of the Bard, I do not think that that which he represented as such a man is gone away.

*I follow the traditional position that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I do acknowledge, though, that there is ample debate about the matter. Hence the phrasing.

Addendum
While this article was posted before my above blog post, I do think (now that I've glanced at it) that it addresses some of the concerns brought up.