On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 24, 2008, at 1:12 PM, MICHAEL YATES wrote:
>
> > I bought the Sunday NYT this morning at a Safeway grocery store in
> > Tucson. A pleasant clerk,
> > probably in her late thirties and almost surely a native English
> > speaker, asked us, "What is the New York Times?"
> > "Is it just a New York paper?" This surprised me, especially since
> > she could have looked at a NYT
> > on any work day. She had no idea what the NYT was.
>
>
> Someone I used to know taught for a while at a college in Charleston,
> SC. She required them to subscribe to the NYT for the semester. Many
> objected, saying they didn't want to read "that Communist paper."
> This wasn't all that long ago - long after there ceased to be such a
> thing as Communism.
>
>
I took a corporate finance class in law school. We were required to read
the Wall Street Journal. Somebody asked if it was available in New York
without a subscription. Another person said that he didn't want to read a
anti-Israeli newspaper. This is not an illustration of stupidity but an
illustration of inexperience and mythology. I have no idea why the
super-Zionist guy thought the WSJ was anti-Israel so I suppose that makes me
ignorant. My supposition about the person who didn't know that the WSJ could
be bought on the news stand was because she was sheltered and never bought
newspapers on the news stand.
There is a difference between the cultural ignorance of not knowing what the New York Times is, or thinking that it is a "communist" newspaper, and the dyslexia and/or innumeracy of not knowing "greater than" and "lesser than."
I am not sure where the example "buyers often enough do not know that a number such as $451,145 is larger than $450,000" comes from but at the U of Chicago I knew some math prodigies who had a hard time getting the "greater than" and "lesser than" correctly in their heads. I was told by a professor that this is a little like "left" "right" dyslexia and has nothing to do with whether the mouth of the signs (> & <) point left or right. Not knowing greater or lesser may point to a brain dysfunction and not to stupidity or it may point to laziness.
As far as the New York Times being "communist" is concerned I was told when I was young by a number of Florida crackers who lived next door to me that any newspaper that supported integration was "communist." Thus the New York Times was communist by definition. I was told that anybody who supported mass transportation was socialist. (This was when I was about 12 years old and it was one indication to me that I must be a socialist.) This form of stupidity can either be considered ignorance or ideology. Some forms of stupidity are forms of oppression , some forms of stupidity are forms of self-delusion or ideology, and some are forms of laziness. Intellectuals tend to have the form of stupidity that is self-delusional and ideological. Non-intellectuals tend to have the forms of stupidity that is a derivative of oppression or just plain laziness. Mine tends to be lazy and self-delusional.
But a persons worth is certainly not measured by their intelligence. I have met plenty of "unintelligent" people who were not bigoted, who were generous, and who I would not call ignorant. And there are people who are not "intelligent" who seem to be more self-aware and aware of others than many intellectuals I know. Intelligence in a person is only one "good" among many and it is not even necessarily a virtue unless it is part of a larger self-conception of generosity and solidarity.
Jerry Monaco