Posted by In his seminal treatise, Bring the Pain, the bard Chris Rock expounds on the premise of “keepin’ it real”.
N*gga’s love to not know.
You can ask a N*gga any question, “Hey N*gga, what’s 2 times 2?”
“I don’t know that sh*t! Keepin’ it real!”
N*gga’s love keepin’ it real. Real dumb.
Wanna know the best way to take care of your money?
Put in a book. Because N*gga’s don’t read!
I find a parallel here between the characters of Mr. Rock’s imagination and certain segments of the white population, we shall call them Rednecks or the Git-er-dun folk.
It’s one thing to take down those who believe that learnin’ is the be-all, end-all. It’s quite another to put forth people who believe that being simple and home-spun is more important in our leadership than thought and nuance. I don’t give a damn if the President is down-to-earth enough that I’d want to have the proverbial beer wif him.
The Right often likes to deride Ivy-league educated liberals (despite the fact that GW Bush went to Yale). They cultivate a base that pronounces itself the “real America”, the so-called down-home, plain-spoken folk who don’t care about all that fancy edumacating. “We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teachers, leave them kids alone.”
It’s a central facet of the American dream that hard work alone should be enough to lift a person off his bootstraps and establish a decent life. If only that were the case anymore. Education, learnin’, are the tools that people use today to lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
I find it unconscionable that the Right goes out of its way to decry such thought and refinement. After all, it was William F. Buckley, if I don’t miss my mark, who cultivated a certain refinement even as he advocated conservative principles.
