as too well insulated from real adversity, the kind of adversity that demands hard thought.

Hey, if you can get people to buy bottled tap water then you can get them to vote for Magilla Gorilla. But you can also fire them up to take up an adversarial stance against their society. It's in the best interest of the rich and powerful to get people to do the former and not the latter. Those who oppose the status quo, however, shouldn't just let it happen. We need to develop ways to frame the debate and how things are perceived.

In the thirties, left-wingers, socialists, communists and anarchists were very active politically, and in many cases tended to live amongst the poor and work in factories so as to be near those they claimed to champion. Think George Orwell, Simone Weil, Muriel Gardner. Others taught the working classes mathematics. And in so doing, offered an alternative way of looking at things; provided the powerless with the tools needed to empower themselves, raised their consciousness, and gave them hope. Many people today forget how popular Sartre was in the fifties. The poor and working classes throughout the world loved him and a throng turned up at his funeral (Americans, alas, flock to dead stars like Valentino; light up candles for John Lennon. Not for them a left-wing philosopher--which says a lot about them, really).

Where are the George Orwell's of today? Vanessa Redgrave has certainly braved being vilified for her advocacy of the Palestinian cause (which was anathema at the time she first rallied to its defence) but she has never actually lived in Gaza. John Pilger and Noam Chomsky have gone to godforsaken places and met with oppressed people but they still go home to comfort. That just wasn't true of Orwell or Weil. The latter may have been a martyr but she felt the plight of other's suffering most keenly and went out of her way to remedy it. She was prepared to put herself in harm's way to help others. Orwell endured many hardships to let us know about injustices.

To bring enlightenment requires more than just writing a book and going to arts festivals. Many left-wingers are just writers or intellectuals or academics these days, and, as such, tend to live very bourgeois lives. They certainly don't risk their lives for a noble cause, as Orwell did when he fought in the Spanish civil war. They don't make their learning accessible to the poor. They're at cocktails. They do interviews to publicize their books. While these activities are important in themselves, writers and intellectuals (and artists) still have responsibility to other human beings. There are sell outs, sure. But many want social justice, are committed to the welfare of others. If we want the public to make enlightened choices, we have to mingle with them and challenge their ideas about things and open their minds to different view points. As it is, television, newspapers, advertisers have their attention and they promote the views of the status quo. The public isn't exposed to adversary view points, so it's no surprise (given how they're constantly bombarded with mindless information and sound bites) they parrot the same notions.

Consumer culture anaesthetizes the mind. We live in an age that no longer values thinking. Critical thinking, in particular, is rarely cultivated. If we want the public to be better informed, and make enlightened decisions, then we are going to have to help people develop this skill (certainly the schools aren't doing it), open work shops so people can learn to think critically, expound ideas, and not just form opinions which they haven't examined closely. Look, if Poland could come up with Solidarity, then we can find ways to engage people and teach them to be reasoners (which is not divorced from emotion: the assassin mind versus the warm heart is a romantic myth). It's important also that the education system be reformed and that a quality education is accessible to all, not just to those who have money. Students should be expected to read, and to read great books (the classics, yes, but also the literature of other countries as well); they should be able to develop an argument, and be able to defend that argument with precision. The media needs to be democratic. The airwaves are public, government-owned and therefore reforms need to be implemented that it is not used for right-wing propaganda purposes as it is now (the problem with the media isn't that it doesn't hold the government accountable--it does when it is the Democrats who are in government; the problem is that it is biased towards the Republicans and suppresses anything that shows them in a negative light).

So the public is to some degree ignorant. Well, of course it is when every discourse, institution, even the courts are monopolized by the Right. If McCain is voted in then there won't be anything left that isn't dominated by the Right. That is almost the way we live now.

this has been a theme of mine for the bush era; apologies if i've bored anyone with it previously. worse yet, i'm no expert in the field in any way.

but in Myers-Briggs and similar type personality tests, frequently things can be lined up on a gut/intuitive - brain/analytic axis; sensing vs intuitive, thinking vs. feeling, judging vs. perceiving for Myers-

Briggs, for instance. And my understanding of the interpretations of such things is that folks who are heavily on either side of the intuitive-analytic axis have a tough time understanding, communicating, trusting, respecting, etc. the folks on the other side.

And that is, to a high degree, where America finds itself today; a lot of highly analytic folks whose jobs and even private lives revolve around analytic work, and a lot of folks whose strength lies more in nonanalytic gut feelings, intuitive decision making, and the voice of experience. The latter are resentful because the first bunch got an easy ride through our educational system, which is all about data-driven analysis; the former are snooty because they have been told all their lives they were superior because of this success.

In fact, of course, not only do both decision making styles have their place (an emergency room doctor who racks his brain over every shred of data and all the possibilities before making a decision may not be as good a choice as one who goes with instinct), but the success of the decision making done by a person of each type can vary. We can all name somebody whose gut instincts have famously been very wrong at every turn; at the same time, the average corporate CEO would be likely to do a pretty decent job navigating by instinct. Similarly, for every big-brain hyperintellectual who can successfully distill the meaning from a ton of confusing data, there are plenty of comic figures who can read the same data and conclude positively that the Earth is indeed flat.

But the split in America today is to a great degree between these two personality types; the person of faith and the person of science. The person who doesn't see that intelligence reports really implicate Saddam Hussein's regime as a threat, and the person who just knows that removing Hussein from power has to be done. The person who can provide literally hundreds of pages of dense text indicating that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is altering the climate dangerously, and the person who thinks that all just obfuscates the silliness of the concept. And of course, not too long ago, the cartoonish media image of the emotionless hyperintellectual robotic presidential candidate, and his opponent the doofy but lovable guy with his downhome real-world common sense. And everyone reading this, as I do when writing it, can't help but view their side as right, and the other side as wrong.