Intellectuals and Their America

There may have been a day when American intellectuals had the luxury of thumbing their noses at pop culture: magazines and journals devoted to serious reflection enjoyed healthy circulations; weighty thinkers won notice for their big ideas rather than their tony digs or cushy university perches; and the lines between high and low culture weren’t nearly as blurred as they are now. American intellectuals can still take refuge in obscure journals that thrive on abstract jargon; and they can write esoteric books and thump their chests in pride that they’re pursuing lines of inquiry that are too important to be trusted to the newspaper or the daily blog. And they’d have a point, too, because such work (caricatures aside) is quite valuable, but it isn’t the only kind of work that now matters for a respectable intellectual.

Depending on your view of these issues, the standards of intellectual work have either been thrown out the window or the snooty gatekeepers of knowledge have lost the battle to silence folk from whom we wouldn’t otherwise hear. The old debate of access versus quality doesn’t hold as much sway as before because some of the smartest thinkers have taken to cyberspace to air their views to an increasingly paperless nation. True, you’ve got to take the good with the bad in such a world, but at least as you pan for intellectual gold you can navigate gigabytes quicker than you can wade through papyrus. (For the record, I’m an unreconstructed Luddite when it comes to the disappearance of the traditional book; I inhale like an addict the dense odor of literacy that comes from leafing through books on library or bookstore shelves as I’m hijacked by serendipity and fix on volumes I wouldn’t have known existed had it not been for the visceral pleasures of browsing.)

I assume, too, that we’re way past the time when intellectuals have to apologize for listening to music that wasn’t made by Europeans a couple of centuries ago or going to movies that aren’t art house staples, although even that bit of snobbery was hard earned because the medium itself was doubted for its intellectual vitality by some of the nation’s brightest lights and biggest mouths. But what has been grist for the scholar’s mill can also churn in the nation’s collective unconscious and appear on silver screens or in hip-hop albums. (Can you even say album any more in this largely post-vinyl era? And compact disc doesn’t exactly solve the problem either in this age of digital downloads.) A lot of deep thinking goes into Jay-Z’s lyrics about hustling and fatherless black homes, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, well at least the first two films, wrestles brilliantly with the role of respect and outlaw behavior in ethnic communities. Even the laziest intellectual and the most uninspired thinker can summon enough opportunism to exploit these artifacts of pop culture in the classroom or on television as a talkin...