Machiavelli’s Smile
I am an intellectual, although I was raised by a pragmatic mother and an emotional father who never finished the 10th grade. I became an intellectual in my teens when I avoided academic or athletic success for bad poetry, clove cigarettes and other accouterments of the Bohemian lifestyle. Much of this has to do with the Jesuits who taught me how to think, but some of it was there from the start. How many 5th graders do you know who read encyclopedias and dictionaries for fun?
But I never forgot my working class roots – which is why I was always the one in my group that held a job, saved money and never chased rainbows.
The result? A middle class suburbanite with house, a fixed 30 year mortgage at a low interest rate, two sensible Japanese cars, a Wife and Kid – but one who can quote romantic and beat poetry, is comfortable in distant, exotic locales, and can sing Clash tunes to embarrass his kid in front of his friends.
In my time I was exposed to all sorts of ideologies. One of my friends left high school and supposedly ran off to join the IRA. A girl I knew in college donned peasant skirts and set off to live with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Others took drugs searching for artistic creativity, resulting in scribbles that looked like epileptic crickets had been dipped in paint and left to seize on canvas, or poetry that was impossible to read by anyone who wasn’t tripping on several hits of acid. I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital until it put me to sleep. I’ve read de Sade until I had to puke. I’ve read Plato’s Republic, and Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. I’ve read anarchists, existentialists, Randists, modernists, post-modernists, and post-post-modernists.
But I still watch football on Sundays.
I suppose my intellectual fore bearers are the Beats because they too had hard scrabble and working class backgrounds (except Ginsburg, who was bourgeoisie – and the lamest of them all.) Though most intellectuals claim to speak for the common man, they believe they know more than he does. The Beats knew different. The Beats felt that the common man had much to teach them, rather than the other way around.
Which brings me to the story of Tanja Nijmeijer, a Dane who ran off to join Columbia’s FARC guerrillas. The Columbian government has gotten hold of her diary and released it to the media.
“I’m tired, tired of the FARC, tired of the people, tired of communal living. Tired of never having anything for myself,” wrote the author, a 29-year-old Dutch woman.In the diary, Nijmeijer abhors the strict discipline imposed by FARC’s male commanders — no smoking, no phone calls, no romantic relationships without their consent. She says the rank and file are hungry and bored, and describes FARC leaders as both materialistic and corrupt.
“How will it be when we take power? The wives of the commanders in Ferrari Testa Rossas with breast implants eating caviar?” she writes.
Intellectuals have always been attracted to idealist causes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the early Crusades weren’t filled with the ranks of Europe’s intellectuals in the Middle Ages – at least, the few that existed and weren’t banned from attending by their abbots. What better for the practical-minded to have at your disposal intelligent men and women who were open to manipulation: Lenin’s “useful idiots.”
So I’m not surprised to read that Toni Vernelli, an Englishwoman, has an abortion to reduce her carbon footprint. I only wish her mother shared her fanaticism 36 years ago. At least Sara Irving had her tubes tied because she felt “a baby would pollute the planet.” No word as of yet on her suicide date, since by her logic her existence continues to spoil the Earth – and bringing to mind a bumper sticker that I recently saw that said: Save the Planet. Kill yourself.
And did I mention that I’ve also read Sun Tzu, Musashi Miyamoto, von Clausewitz and Niccolo Machiavelli? All these men were intellectuals, but they were also practical men interested in results more than theory, and the real rather than the ideal. Of these, Machiavelli has shown himself to be the most useful in day-to-day life. His advice to the Medici princes can be just as easily applied to bosses and office coworkers, and on a grander level his view of international politics of the 15th century can be just as easily applied to those of the 21st century.
Are these men no less intellectuals than Plato, Sartre of Marx? Absolutely not. But they were not only intellectual, they were practical. In essence they blended together intelligence and creativity with the practical – sort of like scientists or engineers. While the idealist knight went off to fight the Crusade, they were his trusted adviser who stayed behind to impregnate his wife. When the Paris intelligentsia rioted – and died – in the streets, they negotiated compromise with the regime that strengthened their own power.
They are the Dick Cheneys in a world of Barack Obamas.
What would Machiavelli make of Nijmeijer, Vernelli and Irving? It’s hard to imagine him doing anything but smiling.
Gustavo F.:
I found this blog thanks to the Geico lolcat… but I stayed for comments like these. Keep it up. Guess I’ll have to read my Machiavelli. BTW I did read Encyclopaedias for fun at age 5 (my father banned the NES 😛 )
I envy you… I always held a job… in a 3rd world country 😛 I graduated, and currently I have no car, no house, no wife (but all that is due to change
). I guess the US is a better place to live economically, though … Still, congratulations on all that 
sorry for the rant.
6 February 2009, 5:05 pm