happy memorial day (is class the new cred?)

on this memorial day, i will confess that i get very emotional when stuff about dying for one's country comes up in movies and tv shows, plays and news reports. i cry when kenneth branagh makes his "st. crispin's day" speech in the movie henry v. (i know, kenneth branagh of all people, right?) i got choked up during the recent elizabeth I movie on hbo when queen elizabeth, played by the great helen mirren, made a morale-boosting speech to her troops (apparently historically accurate) before they went into battle with the spanish armada. i think it's just insanely touching when people throw themselves into something so much bigger than themselves, to the degree that they completely irrationally agree to die for it. pretty different from an army of one, eh? i think that as we soak in a culture of generalized entitlement, even religion doesn't offer such a chance to submerge yourself.

my father and both my grandfathers are veterans, and for reasons alluded to above, i'm pretty proud of that aspect of my family and impressed with it. i am also one of the only other academics i know whose family served in the military. i guess that's because most (not all) other academics i know have academic parents, or non-academic intellectual parents, and many of these same people i know went to private school, and/or their parents went to private school, and grad school at an ivy league college or its equivalent, etc., etc. in the attempt to wrap my brain around whatever it is we're talking about when we talk about class, i am frequently, painfully, aware of its markers even if i will never know these markers' provenance. moreover, i attach my own personality traits of which i am proud (like intense loyalty in friendship) to my own (albeit "only" middlish) class, and congratulate myself on being so very authentic. or, when i get my feelings hurt by someone who comes from the landed gentry, i blame their snobbishly insular weak constitution. nobody said this was pretty, folks.

anyway, to see from the greater perspective for a mo, class puts academics in a pretty sticky situation, of having to, on aesthetic and intellectual principle, object to markers of low class, such as bad nutrition, guns and (christian) religious zealotry, even while, also on principle, purport to advocate supposedly liberatory politics. i guess this is pretty old news, paradox of democracy, etc., plus who ever said one's beliefs had to be seamlessly consistent with one another? but this is a special challenge, by no means unique to me or those of my ilk, for making sense of being both individuals and members of communities at the same damn time. and i don't think that generalized entitlement is helping make the challenge any easier.

a nice CHE artile on the topic
the great DH's post on the topic