Casual
GELERNTER, DAVID
Casual OWNERSHIP SOCIETY Sometimes words tell the truth on purpose; sometimes they give it away by accident. Both things happened last week in mid-Palo Alto, down the road from Stanford...
...Most culture leaders and Boss Intellectuals seem to have no sense of ownership in America...
...If you don't own the place, you don't make the rules...
...A few weeks ago Yale students held an event called "Sex Week"—"one of the most provocative campus events in the country," said the AIP (No doubt...
...I don't know...
...Why should an establishment intellectual (unlike the average citizen) have no property sense in America, no sense of proprietorship or belonging...
...How could they have felt the same way as the WASP Old Guard used to...
...Many have no sense of ownership in the American university either...
...In the intellectual world at large, it happens even less...
...American Intellectuals are still struggling with the sensation that the universities they run don't belong to them, and the country they boss doesn't either...
...It is a strange, choked sense of honor that makes so many intellectuals feel unworthy to be part owners and full citizens of their own nation...
...But I nearly jumped out of my pants...
...Only when they acquire a sense of property will they have a sense of propriety...
...The Harvards and Yales used to be social powerhouses run by and for social big-shots...
...Since many intellectuals don't feel that the United States belongs to them, it's no surprise that they don't give a damn for propriety where the United States is concerned...
...DAVID GELERNTER...
...Why do the people in charge think and act this way...
...It's the least they can do...
...Where almost no one has the sense that this school belongs to him and had better be treated with respect, dignity, propriety...
...If it is "improper" for Americans to defame a president on a foreign stage, or spread rumors that are dangerous to Americans abroad, or strive to convince our enemies to hold out just long enough for U.S...
...troops to be withdrawn . . . American intellectuals on the whole aren't likely to condemn any of these things, or to see anything wrong with them...
...Especially when they had the impression (generally correct) that the WASP Old Guard had once hoped to keep them out...
...There's another, more specific sense of absent propriety among America's Boss Intellectuals and academic leaders...
...After the war, intellectuals gradually took over...
...But "not everyone was happy," my son Dan reports in his blog Critical Mass (he's a Yale freshman...
...A revolution after the Second World War changed the nature of American universities...
...I orn star Jesse Jane is apparently displeased that there is still 'a social stigma attached to working in the pornography industry.'" Eminent porn stars, sex therapists, and others got to participate in the festivities...
...Which was true...
...Therefore they have no sense of propriety regarding the university, or of proper versus improper...
...a hope we all three shared...
...Both things happened last week in mid-Palo Alto, down the road from Stanford University, ground zero of Silicon Valley—where pale pink plum-blossoms bloom in February and Ferraris are as common as Ponti-acs in Peoria...
...Again there are many reasons, but here is one...
...Yale is no different in this way from hundreds of other major schools— institutions at which almost no one in charge, faculty or administrator, seems to have any property sense in the university...
...They looked around their new domains—the plain colonial brick, fancy Victorian stone, collegiate Gothic—and the clubs, fraternities, secret societies—and they knew: We didn't build this place...
...Many of those who should have served and did not carry guilt around for the rest of their lives...
...I think we can do some good for our country," one of them said...
...I was too young to serve, but have no grounds for thinking I would have behaved any better than my elders...
...If America belongs to them and they to America, they rarely say so...
...The answer is complicated, but Vietnam must be a factor...
...But we've reached the right questions...
...public resolve to crumble and U.S...
...How do you give someone a sense of belonging, of property, of propriety...
...Many of today's senior intellectuals were draft-age during Vietnam, and managed to get out of serving...
...Vietnam was a Working-Class War— Christian G. Appy published a book by that title in 1993...
...Just a casual statement...
...And often you don't care about the rules...
...I was having lunch with two colleagues: two talented, ambitious, successful young men who have put together an imposing new company to build software for defense and security purposes...
...And those who have no sense of propriety and of what's appropriate equally have no sense of property and of what is proper...
...Among technology researchers and entrepreneurs, America is rarely called "our country...
Vol. 11 • March 2006 • No. 25
