Intellectuals — sometimes I think most of them — go through thinking they don’t fit in. It takes a while to get that straight.
Law school, I used to tell my pre-law students, was like an intellectual boot camp. What basic military training did for your body, the first-year law courses are supposed to do for your mind.
I gave some thought to whether I was creating a danger of putting them off by using the term, “intellectual.” While the danger was real, I decided, there is in fact a class of people for whom the world of ideas is just as real as the world of things, people who have a stack of books near wherever they go home to relax and who can never quite seem to catch up with the stack. I should not work in a bookstore, I used to say, for the same reason an alcoholic should not work in a bar.
The bad rap on intellectuals — if I understand it — -is that we are an unfortunate combination of useless and arrogant. We can do nothing useful but we still look down on those who can.
I’ve spent all of my adult life in college towns, leaving only to do things I had persuaded myself would be useful. The reason I thought I wanted to live in college towns had to do with the people who would be my neighbors, people like myself for whom the world of abstract ideas seemed real. I guess that could be taken as arrogance, although I don’t see that conclusion as necessary. It’s just easier to talk about what you’ve read lately with someone who is a reader.
Law school admission standards mean that if you arrive in a top-shelf law school, you are used to being a hotshot. The news breaks harder for some people than others that, suddenly, everybody is a hotshot.
When a professor who was famed for roasting students who had not read the assigned cases called on me in an early class, he first asked me to state the facts. That was no problem because my imposter anxiety was running wild and I had of course read the assignment.
Then he asked me how the case should be decided, ignoring how it was decided and what the statute said. Hah! Another fat softball, low and slow across the middle of home plate. I answered without hesitation, and paused to enjoy the sound of the cracking bat and the collective reaction of the fans, when his third question dropped into the pause:
Why?
Nonplussed, I mumbled something about it not making sense any other way.
Oh, really? Would someone like to suggest another outcome that would make sense for Mr. Russell?
The discussion ate most of the class, and well before it was over, I understood that the professor’s decision to move on from me could be seen as an extraordinary act of grace….or a desire to finish in a reasonable time. Whichever, I was only skinned up a bit rather than dissected.
I survived the class and the rest of law school, passed the bar exam, practiced law for a couple of years and then had a first career as a judge. Now, after a second career as a professor, I’m a twice-retired geezer. One of my many health issues is insomnia, and I’ve learned not to lie in bed and wish I was sleeping. I won my race to finish my memoir, but I understand my time is limited and I will not waste it.
Tracy and I have separate bedrooms now — an arrangement I hate — -so I can take in information or spew it out in a writing without interrupting her sleep. I have a television in my bedroom for the first time in my life. I sometimes use it in the wee hours of the morning, when I cannot sleep.
I used Netflix to learn more fine points about the Battle of Britain, where the Brits launched some 700 fighter aircraft to repel about 1,100 Nazi fighters protecting bombers tasked to destroy — at first — military targets.
I knew the Brits were putting pilots up with inadequate training, but I had not heard that hundreds of volunteer pilots came from occupied Europe to stand with the RAF and the Royal Canadian Air Force as a means to strike back. When Winston Churchill made his famous remark:
Never have so many owed so much to so few,
those few included Poles, Czechs, Dutch, French and others — flying to protect the free governments that would be headquartered in London for the duration with a primary mission of coordinating resistance in their homelands.
I do love the study of history and during the last election, I was watching film about how the British people stood up to the Blitz when the Nazis branched out from military targets. I found myself clicking over to current news and watching how much suffering Americans would endure to cast a vote. In some states, wait times of eight hours and up were common. As voters lined up in utterly unnecessary queues, good citizens brought pizzas and bottled water (soon to be illegal in some states under the new voter suppression laws) and brigades of lawyers were working overtime to clear the obstacles thrown up by local governments when controlled by Republicans.
After the voting was underway in Texas, voting rights lawyers were challenging Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order that each county could have only one place to return absentee ballots without regard to the population or the geographical area of the county. The state government was also the plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to stop majority-minority Harris County from allowing drive-through voting.
The caravans of brown people President Trump warned about have not yet taken over in my county, but I am mobility impaired and accustomed to voting from my car. What would be the harm, even if I did not have disabled veteran plates and an electric scooter attached to the back that I need to use if they make me come inside to vote? My mother walked on late last year, but I used to have poll workers bring her a voting machine because of her mobility problems.
My mother — who never identified with any political party — had a hell of a time voting in the last year of her life. Thanks to me, I’m ashamed to admit. While she lived to her mid-90s, she would regret that she did not get to vote for a woman POTUS, but she still wanted to vote even after Hillary Clinton lost the first time.
(Note: some of this will make marginally more sense to those who have read my memoir and so understand that she did not raise me and we were not at all close.
She gave birth to four boys. I was the first and I was raised by my grandparents. The second was given up in an open adoption. She raised the other two.
When she got old, I was the only one both able and willing to take care of her.)
She had moved from a nursing home in Williamson County to a nursing home in Atascosa County at her request, when the Williamson County registrar sent her a purge notice. That’s where the government tells you that if you don’t check-in, you will have to register to vote all over again to cast a ballot.
My mother had been fighting a battle with dementia and appeared to be losing when she moved. In my opinion, she had less connection with objective reality than Donald Trump and so ought not to be voting for random names. She also no longer expressed any interest in voting. To avoid the purge, I would have to figure out how to change counties for her.
I let her be purged, which turned out to be a very bad mistake because the move meant a change of doctors changed up her medication and her dementia eased.
Picture this: a woman circa 90 years old who has been registered to vote in Texas her entire life but for about three years when she was living with me while I was teaching in Indiana. How complicated could it be to get her registered to vote again the year after she was purged?
Very complicated.
The problem was coming up with enough IDs within those allowed in the voter suppression law. She had given up her driver’s license while in Indiana. Her DPS ID card was expired, since there’s not a lot of use for it in a nursing home. By the time I understood the problem, there appeared to be no chance of getting Oklahoma to cough up a very old birth certificate in time. The Okies, after all, have their own voters to keep from voting.
I’ll spare you the dissertation on all the hurdles the state of Texas erected, and I don’t dare tell you how I got over the last one afternoon on election day and on the second try found an election judge who did not make her vote on a provisional ballot.
Most of the targets of the voter suppression laws and practices the Republicans claim do not exist are not very wealthy. The evidence in every lawsuit so far shows they are disproportionately minority and often elderly.
I see people losing a day of work to stand in line — having lost several days getting registered — -and their willingness to suffer reminds me of the Brits bucking up during the Blitz.
A poll in the U.S. before the Battle of Britain showed less than 20 percent support for coming to the aid of the Brits. Months of Nazi bombs caught on newsreels narrated by Edward R. Murrow turned that sentiment around.
In this country today, people who could not identify Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner as three young men who went to Mississippi to register black voters and were killed by law enforcement officers moonlighting in KKK sheets, choose not to oppose Republican voter suppression laws because the former POTUS told them that Joe Biden stole the election and the massive fraud had to be stopped.
I will goose the Way Back Machine and remember the first presidential election I paid close attention to was held in 1960, and I thought the temperature was high. Still, nobody then suggested an armed insurrection to make sure the people voted correctly by the lights of the people who cling to insurrection as the purpose of the Second Amendment.
(Russell digression™: Think about that. If you were drafting a charter for democratic government after a war to throw off a monarchy that contained a role for citizen militia, and if sentiment was running against the whole idea of maintaining a standing army as too expensive and unnecessary, the second thing you would do after protecting speech would be making sure the people were able to shoot at the police and national guard?
Of course, history buffs would point out that there would be no police until 1838. Law enforcement was the sheriff, who sometimes had deputies, but the sheriff would raise a posse from the citizen militia if needed.
The National Guard did exist, but it was under the command of state authorities and in some states calling up the guard was indistinguishable from activating the citizen militia. There is plenty of reason to think the right to keep and bear arms was intended as an individual right. I am licensed before the U.S. Supreme Court and I signed on with many other professors to an appellate brief suggesting to the SCOTUS that the Heller case should be decided in favor on an individual right. It was, but how does it follow that another purpose was to protect starting a civil war?)
Back in 1960, it was alleged that JFK benefitted from some urban votes stolen by the Daley machine in Chicago and some rural votes from Duval County cemeteries in Texas. Both allegations were probably true.
It’s hard to see how that could change the outcome of a national election even before offsetting thefts on the other side. Not to mention how allowing Republicans to shoot at the Chicago Police Department and the Duval County Sheriff would be unlikely to either change the outcome or make things better in any way.
Those incidents do give history buffs a point of comparison for how the media handles vote stealing. It’s hard to picture some reporter winning a Pulitzer for keeping quiet.
Another place comparison might be informative is among the 80 percent of voters who told a pollster this week that the situation with undocumented persons on the southern border is “a crisis.” If you’ve lived in the borderlands, you will have a lot to compare after you get up from rolling around laughing.
All of this is to ask if it is so bad to let the class of people called intellectuals vote? Assuming, of course, that in the age of post-truth politics it makes any difference who votes.
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Previously Published on Medium
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