Which one are you? Link JOCKS VS. GEEKS Tue Oct 12, 8:00 PM ET By Ted Rall The Two Tribes of American Politics SEATTLE--We Americans are about to vote on what kind of country we want to be. Will we continue down the same road we've followed for over two centuries, as an imperfect nation dedicated to the preservation and expansion of individual liberties, whose Bill of Rights stands both as its greatest achievement and its most shamefully unfulfilled ideal? Or will we lurch to the right, voluntarily cashing in our personal freedom in exchange for citizenship in an empire constantly at war, reviled by the rest of the world but--until history spawns a worthy challenger--its undisputed master? Issues like gay marriage and partial-birth abortion lead to a lot of spilled ink but are relatively inconsequential in the big picture of American politics. What divides our left from our right--each of which considers the other dangerous, if not treasonous--are competing visions of the United States. Were America's military and economic dominance over the globe to fade while our living standards and constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms remained intact, liberals wouldn't fret all that much. As we've seen since September 2001, on the other hand, conservatives don't lose sleep over increasing poverty, police checkpoints, censorship or racially motivated arrests or indefinite detentions since they see those developments as supporting the primary aim--remaining the world's sole superpower. John Edwards (news - web sites) talks about "two Americas," two classes for whom opportunity is either a birthright or a pipe dream. What he describes is real, yet the other gap--between those who see the U.S. as a nation based on individual rights and those who see it first and foremost as a powerful empire--is almost impossible to bridge. Individualists and imperialists can't agree to disagree because they don't even agree on what the United States of America is, or what it should become. Republicans, who view George W. Bush as a commander in chief leading the empire into dangerous battles abroad against hostile savages, equate him with the nation itself. "Why do you hate America?" they reply to his critics. Liberals, who view presidents as taxpayer-funded employees, are inherently hostile to the notion that any one man can be the embodiment of a democratic America. They roll their eyes at what they believe to be a cheap rhetorical advice although, in fact, the conservatives are dead serious about the question. American politics are just as tribal-based as those of Afghanistan (news - web sites). But where they have Pashtuns and Tajiks, we have jocks and cheerleaders versus freaks and geeks. There are two types of high school students: the sunny kids whose eyes light up at the announcement of a pep rally, who race to the gymnasium to shout the fight song, and the sullen black T-shirt-wearing hordes who let out disgusted sighs while hunting for a hiding place to smoke cheap cigarettes. Conformists versus contrarians, extroverts versus introverts, fans of Top 40 music versus fans of obscure, critically-acclaimed bands, people who believe those in authority versus those who don't. Athletes grow up to vote Republican, dorks Democratic. The great divide was chronicled by the John Hughes films of the 1980s--aggressive, bland privilege meets victimized, appealing alienation and wins--and it lives on in a classic right-wing Internet reposte to leftist posters: "You got beat up in school a lot, didn't you?" Members of the in crowd can marry those of the out crowd, work together and even be friends, but they will never share basic assumptions about the way the world works. It's hazy now, but our two tribes used to agree about a lot more stuff. Democrats and Republicans both thought that Jimmy Carter was a nice man but an ineffective administrator, that Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) was a good speaker, that Bill Clinton (news - web sites) was a womanizer. Then the 2000 election was stolen and Bush exploited the 9/11 attacks as an excuse for wars of conquest and domestic political clampdowns. Republicans demanded total obeisance, Democrats refused, and both sides began spewing red-hot rhetoric that makes them irreconcilable. So half the electorate looks at George W. Bush and sees a courageous, plainspoken man of integrity, comparable to Churchill, whereas the other half thinks he's a dullard and a pipsqueak whose strings are pulled by corrupt corporate executives. Since support for Bush or Kerry has more to do with tribal affiliation than issues or suitability for office, neither the incumbent nor his opponent's performance on the campaign trail nor the latest news on the economy or the wars budge the polls more than a few points back and forth. Incredibly, only one or two percent of the electorate remains undecided. In a few weeks, either the imperialists or the individualists will emerge triumphant. The winning constituency will claim the right to decide what kind of country the U.S. is and should be. In truth, however, the two tribes of postmodern American politics are too closely matched for any election to settle that question.
Hey! It was a good read. He didn't say, "The worm has turned," but he wrote a good column, whether one agrees with it or not, in my opinion. It was designed to provoke not only the Bush supporters, but the Kerry (well, really Democratic) supporters as well. Almost equal opportunity provoking... what more can you ask for from an op-ed piece? Keep D&D Civil!!
i thought it was a good piece, until i got to that part. when someone writes such patently false and inflammatory bull****, i tend to ignore the rest. at first, i thought perhaps he was being ironic, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I thought it was kinda stupid. I mean, it's a clever comparison, but it doesn't seem to bear out in real life, or at least not in the one I'm seeing. What's more, he employs this device of saying that politics this year has gotten more divided. Is it just me or do we hear this at every presidential election?
JV, I've seen them since 1960, and I've never, NEVER seen the country as polarized as it is in this election. Keep D&D Civil!!
I've been watching for a much much shorter amount of time. And, it all seems the same to me. Go figure.
This reminds me of an old article I came across on the best website on the net: The Karate Kid Website BLOND and BAD; The Advent of the Preppie As Screen Villain By Rita Kempley, The Washington Post September 2, 1984 ONCE YOU COULD tell a bad guy by the color of his hat. Now it's the color of his hair. We should have seen it coming. In the early James Bond film "From Russia With Love," the SMERSH killer was the essence of Aryan. The American-made war movies of the 1940s celebrated diversity, but they didn't really prepare us for the heroes and antiheroes of the 1980s. In general, blonds used to have more fun: The late '50s to early '60s were halcyon for button-down types like Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue and Pat Boone. They were heroes suited to the prosperous, blase' "Happy Days." Back then the movies' answer to ethnic was Frankie Avalon. [KK Site Editors Trivia: His son played 'Chucky' --one of Daniel's 'friends' on the beach at the beginning of the film] "But then all of a sudden, everybody had had it with the back seat," says director John G. Avildsen ("Rocky", "The Karate Kid"). "The blacks said 'enough' in the late '50s, the students said 'enough' in the '60s, and the women said 'enough' in the '70s. The vibrations of the culture shake the screen. And nobody wants to be pointed at as a bigot." So new dark-haired heroes emerged, often banded together in multi-ethnic Mod Squads. And inevitably, blonds became the establishment villains. The trend represents more than the ancient rope-tug between haves and have-nots. "It's the reemergence of the American dream," says Richard Stephens, sociologist at George Washington University. "We've had such bad world press on our divisiveness. It's a calculated thing on the part of the producers to show the other faces of America." Now the Lacoste alligator is tormenting minorities. And the villain of the decade is a fair-haired boy. Former golden boys are up against everybody from gays to fatties in a surfeit of centrist films, most recently "The Karate Kid" and "Revenge of the Nerds." The "Nerds" creators wanted to be among the first to zing Oxford cloth. "Yeah, we hate preppies," says Steve Zacharias, who cowrote the film with Jeff Buhai. "We were trying to show that the empty-headed beautiful people who seem to be running the world aren't. It's the smart people who are persecuted because they're not as attractive. Henry Kissinger is probably the most famous nerd." Indeed, the writers say they used him as a heroic model. Buhai says that he and Zacharias were pro-establishment until "God took away our hair," and adds, "We tried to write almost an anti-Nazi movie." Naturally, the villain is Aryan. In "Nerds," Ted McGinley, blond with cheekbones like oar blades, is president of Alpha Beta fraternity (another member is Matt Salinger, J.D.'s son) and quarterback of the football team. He leads fraternity and team against the comedy's multi-minority nerd heroes. McGinley has more than a lot in common with William Zabka, with hair the color of Swiss cheese, the villain in "The Karate Kid." McGinley says he's "the all-American boy straight from the beach." And Zabka says he has been the boy-next-door in 20 commercials. "I have a, you know, real innocent California look." Zabka plays the leader of a pack of upper-class toughs, preppie Hell's Angels by day, country club members by night. They're all blonds, right down to Chad McQueen's peroxided roots. (Chad McQueen, ironically, is antihero Steve McQueen's son.) Avildsen wanted a contrast with "Karate Kid" hero Ralph Macchio's dark visage. "We bleached his hair just to continue the look." Avildsen's characterizations, in fact, show how dramatically champions have changed. In Avildsen's "Rocky," the Italian Stallion took on the black champ Apollo Creed. And now, about a decade later, a heroic Italian boy fights off a WASP opponent in what Avildsen has called "The Ka-rocky Kid." By the end of the 1970s, Hollywood was hunting for new heroes -- and on came Pacino, De Niro, Travolta, Hoffman and Stallone. Eventually, the dusky Jennifer Beals did what even Travolta couldn't -- turned her aspirations into a tour with the Pittsburgh Ballet Company. And who did she out-flash? A haughty chorus of WASP ballerinas. The blond, meanwhile, was earning his villainy. Indeed, by the middle 1970s, there were already signs of decay, hints that the torch would pass. In "Animal House," the heroes were bad fraternity boys and the villains were blond fraternity boys. By last summer, the poison of privilege oozed all over the screen in such sex farces as "Class," "Private Tutor" and "Private School." Even Tom Cruise, in "Risky Business," couldn't get into Princeton until he pimped for an Ivy League recruiter. Early this summer, "Up the Creek" chronicled the debauchery of the tow-headed Ivy University's raft team versus the brunets from Lepetomane College. And the brunets always seem to get the girl, usually a blond. Frequently this same beauty is the cause of the contest between the WASPs and the un-WASPs. McGinley sees red when nerd Anthony Edwards makes eyes at his cheerleader, and Zabka beats up the Karate Kid after his cheerleader makes eyes at Macchio. "Bachelor Party" villain Robert Prescott seems ready to do anything to get his girl back from hero Tom Hanks, a bus driver. The motif persists in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Outsiders," a story of haves and have-nots set in Tulsa, Okla. Writer S.E. Hinton called them socs (soshs) and greasers, and says, "The names change from year to year, from group to group, but it is always the privileged class that make others feel like outsiders." The privileged, she adds, are "aimless, riding around and looking for something besides comfort." In "Karate Kid," that's precisely the case. Zabka describes his character as "very rich, has a really nice cycle. He comes from a very chichi family in the Hills. They the gang aren't sleazy types, but they're really screwed up." He recalls how he and the other young actors got motivated by talking over their make-believe parents' neuroses, alcoholism and drug abuse. Mean streets no longer make mean kids -- brick colonials do. And it takes a street-wise hero to redeem a well-heeled bad boy. In "Karate Kid," Zabka sees the light thanks to a Japanese-American, an Italian-American and a wise young woman. Likewise in "Trading Places," Dan Aykroyd, as a rich WASP broker, is redeemed by poverty, humiliation and his friendships with hooker Jamie Lee Curtis and hustler Eddie Murphy. The trio join forces against Mainline Philadelphians played by Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy, an older subcategory of preppie barbarian. Harvard Business School graduate Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association, thinks there ought to be an Ivy Anti-Defamation League. "Gangsters have Italian names. Blacks won't do. Nor Asians . . . Aleutians, even Eskimos are organized. Pickets make life difficult. You find some group in America that is politically inefficient and unorganized -- the WASPs and the businessmen -- and lay it on strong. "To me, it is one of the most oblique aspects of stories, novels, TV or movies, to see a businessman always portrayed as a duplicitous character. It is neither sound, nor reasonable. If the Chamber of Commerce or Harvard Business School got organized and raised hell, it would be a tragedy for storytelling. It would be a barren plain indeed, if the last bastion of villainy got organized." It would also be harder to tell a story without easily recognized symbols of good and evil, Valenti adds. Multi-ethnic camaraderie has been extolled at times of social crisis: during World War II, the Great Depression and now as America undergoes demographic upheaval. It's like the '40s now, says Valenti, citing the reemergence of the "war picture syndrome -- a black, a wise-cracking New Yorker, a Pole, an Italian kid -- a U.N. in a foxhole. Except there's probably a homosexual and a lesbian in there, too. And they're organized, for God's sake." In the 1980s, it's out of the foxhole and into centrist films like "Police Academy" and "Tank." Or "D.C. Cab," created by former Washingtonian Topper Carew, who sees the multi-ethnic phenomenon as part of the profit motive. "People of color in movies today is good business," he says. "Jesse's onto something." In other words, there's a melting pot of gold at the end of the rainbow coalition. Blacks and women joined by Asians, Latins and poor southern whites and/or disaffected Vietnam veterans have found in film what eluded Jackson in the primaries. "D.C. Cab" showed, Carew says, "how a multi-ethnic, ragtag group could be successful if they had a common goal. People have difficulty accepting that America is extremely multi-ethnic, so movies must accept that reality . . . tap the talents of and speak to those ethnic groups ." Paul Mazursky's "Moscow on the Hudson," with Robin Williams as a Russian immigrant, is a star-spangled celebration of heterogeneity -- Clevant Derricks as a black security guard, Alejandro Rey as a Cuban immigration lawyer, and Maria Chochita Alonso as an Italian cosmetic salesgirl. Mazursky's films tend to be sociological mirrors -- like "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969) on the sexual revolution and "An Unmarried Woman" (1978) on women's liberation. In its celebration of the immigrant-hero, "Moscow on the Hudson" and its ilk are new-wave Horatio Alger fables and more. It's probably equally significant that ethnic films glorify the new demographics instead of denouncing the old. About 10 percent of the population celebrates Simo'n Boli'var Day. Planes skywrite "Bienvenidos al Tiempo Miller" above California beaches. Things change. We get films like Robert Duvall's pseudo-documentary on gypsies, "Angelo, My Love," and "Chan Is Missing," a low-budget Chinese-American docu-mystery. We even get a remake of "Scarface," with a Cuban lead, and "El Norte," an American-made film in Spanish and English. "El Norte" director Gregory Nava, a Chicano, predicts, "The U.S. is not going to be recognizable in 20 years. The Americas are changing . . . becoming one system. Immigration from the south is reaching the levels of the eastern migration." "El Norte," a story of L.A.'s barrio of illegal aliens, is the nitty-gritty "Moscow on the Hudson." It bares the tragedy in the promise of America, and it parcels out blame. Says Nava, "It does not scapegoat whites, but it does present them as thoughtless as they really are. If you have a white American who's very racist, it does two things: It presents the situation a bit falsely, because the vast majority of Americans are not like that. And you present the belief that all you have to do is overcome those people and all's well." So where do we go for our villains now? There may be a faint trace of good news for the traditional American elite. "Oxford Blues," a new release, pits Oxford against Harvard in a two-man scull race. It's a grudge match that's been building for 25 years -- sort of a "Rocky" for the well-to-do -- and the Ivy Leaguers are the underdogs. There may also be a small change in audience reaction. Recently, a dad took his 13-year-old daughter to a "Nerds" matinee. They were wearing matching khakis and Lacoste shirts. On the way home, she was reported to have said this: "Daddy, I like the boys from Alpha Beta House non-Nerds better." Are we about to hear someone murmur, "Some of my best friends are preppies?"
