Crazy chicken lays crazy eggs
A Mapp egg. They’re always like this. Usually, she lays half a dozen or so and then goes broody for the rest of the season, so <shrug>
Changing the subject. I’ve tried not to, but couldn’t miss some of the very public ugliness triggered by Maggie’s death. Out of all proportion to anything she actually did. Not too many of the intellectual elite who hate her most are coal miners, after all. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s because she laughed at the chattering classes. And because she was right. And because of a quality that’ll take me a minute to explain.
I’ve told you before, working with engineers was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Engineers are practical men. They do what I used to think scientists do: they do stuff, they observe the result and they are confident they have just learned something worth knowing. How much pressure did the fastener take before it snapped? At what temperature did the adhesives fail? How much schmutz accumulates in a pipe carrying hard water over an 18 month period? (“Schmutz” is a useful engineering term I learned).
Some of the scientists were like that too, surely — or science wouldn’t advance. But some were more interested in the hypothesis and not so keen on the result.
And moving away from the hard sciences into the soft sciences and the humanities, I observe there is a whole class of clever thinkers who fall in love with ideas. Big, complicated ideas. Elegant ideas. Beautiful ideas that are difficult to grasp. And really, honestly, deep down but without saying so they don’t give a shit if the ideas are true or not. They’d rather not know. It spoils the effect.
In fact, I’m convinced some of them especially love with ideas that are false, because it takes so much effort, so many hours of study, so much scholarship to clasp a falsehood to your bosom. You have to be one of the highly-educated elite to believe really obviously dumbass stuff. Squares don’t get it. Your grandma don’t get it. Toothless hillbillies laugh at you, so you KNOW you’re on the right track.
So you get Joe Biden — nobody’s idea of an ideas man, but he hangs around them and absorbs their chatter like a parrot — wisely opining that we have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt. Because you have to be extra fucking smart to understand how that works.
And then along comes Maggie and says, “any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.” Cash in, cash out, new shoes will have to wait until next month to make it balance. A housewifely skillset. And she governed with it. And it worked.
And all the overcredentialled Oxbridge (or Ivy League) technocratic smarty pantses who believe themselves our natural ruling class (including quite a few on “our” side of the aisle) foam and gnash their teeth. It’s all so ugly and ordinary and dreary.
It demeans them and their powerful brains.
April 9, 2013 — 10:12 pm
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