FREE YOUR MIND
J. Frank Dobie was a naturalist, folklorist, author, and an English professor at the University of Texas. He wrote eloquently about cattle, cacti, and the colorful people of his native Brush Country in South Texas.
Dobie was an erudite gentleman who believed in civil rights, extending the vote to women, and treating people and the land with respect. He also understood the transformative power of education, and the role his advocacy played at a time when these liberties were routinely denied to women and people of color, and just as often shunned by those with the privilege to directly benefit from them.
I’d like to share a short, pithy passage of his that was published in 1945.
In America, a powerful and persistent doctrine dictates that businessmen should run the government and also education, and that a poet is to be distrusted even in a minor government post. The stark passion for stark business in charge of government will have nothing to do with the thinking and imagining class. Millionaire businessman William Randolph Hearst may buy art in wholesale lots, but somehow he has never melted the beautiful and free into his own soul.
Like many talented writers, Dobie was a seer and he saw right through the dullards of his time, which 80 years on, eerily echoes the imbeciles of our time.
Could it be that some people are born with a lack of imagination? I don’t think so. We are born naturally curious and playful, only to find that the way we are isn’t the way “the world” wants us to be. In America, we must be productive and our training from preschool through graduate school enforces this. Our philosophies too. If we fail to become a successful worker, we will be marginalized and eventually cast out.
In the advertising business where I spent too much time, ideas are currency. But, in stiff or “stark” businesses — the sort of businesses that become ad agency clients — ideas of merit can frighten powerful executives. In their feeble minds, ideas are dangerous because they offer something new. Our sharpest ideas also challenge us to think and when we think, we are free. Freedom is not what capitalists want. They want more capital.
Dobie is known for his focus on the Southwest, but he was also a keen observer of people. In a newspaper column from the early 1950s, he wrote, “People who distrust change, who distrust democracy, who distrust ideas always rely on and worship mediocrity…Consequently, they put mediocre minds in power.”
As a card-carrying member of the “imagining class,” as Dobie calls it, I have a right to object to those who would distrust a poet and embrace mediocrity, and I do object, vehemently because it is offensive and wrong. It is also wrong to treat teachers like fools, to ban books, rewrite history, and gut the Department of Education. In this race to the bottom, there are no winners.
The owners of America Inc. want obedient workers who are too taxed to complain and too scared to fight. This is why they’re hell-bent on destroying education and diminishing the educated. Thankfully, it’s a stupid “idea” forwarded by the dumbest people in our nation. When learning is a form of resistance — and it is — we will read, write, teach, and honor humanity, history, and the arts like never before.
