I would submit that you don’t go through the long, and arduous process of getting a PhD if you don’t have a pretentious bone in your body. I, in fact, have more than one pretentious bone, and often find myself strategizing around subtle ways of counteracting this impulse in myself.
None of my students call me Dr. Elrick. Nor do I want them to…is what I say to them. Even though it’s fine in the they do. After all, I gave up a comfortable career in media in my mid-40s to make $23,000 a year as a grad student and sit in seminars talking about performatively opaque french philosophy. It was hard, and I do get a little thrill when a student who I haven’t met addresses me as doctor.
Of course I have an office filled with pretentious books as well. Stuart Hall, Michele Foucalt, Raymond Williams, CLR James. My strategy here is to require that every shelf must also have something silly on it. So keen observers will notice that sandwiched in between Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard is Yakoff Smirnoff’s classic America on Six Rubles a Day or a wayward copy of Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery. Note: it helps that my bookcase is also littered with sports cards. A jaunty stack of 1991 Fleer basketball cards, I like to think, projects a certain every man quality.
Still, there are things even I can’t resist, and a succinct quote from a great thinker is one of them. When I hear a good one, like most things to do with my rapidly calcifying brain, it has a very short half life. It will rattle around up there for a week or two before being permanently obscured by some much less useful bit of information that I am unable to forget, no matter how hard I try. “What was that quote about authoritarianism? Doug Overton? No, that’s an NBA guy. He played at La Salle. Drafted by the Pistons.”
We all know how this goes.
I now have a note on my phone where I collect quotes that I just like, or think may come in handy—i.e. make me sound smart—should the opportunity to employ them arise. A handful of these bangers are from the podcast Know Your Enemy, a crucial part of my media diet, featured on what I have started to think of as a sort of Mount Rushmore of keeping me sane. David Roth of Defector is on there, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, his podcasting partner, the author John Ganz, the author, artist and researcher Joshua Citarella.
The latest quote from KYE to find it’s way into my notes app is from Mr. Democracy in America himself, the french political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, and it goes like this: “A tyrant is relaxed enough to forgive his subjects for failing to love him, provided that they do not love one another.” My interview with Sam and Matt, is nominally about friendship in the context of politics, but it resonates with this quote in particular.
“Friendship is actually quite a dangerous thing,” Bell told me. “Friendship is this thing that doesn’t have an immediate social purpose, or social purpose that is defined by the state. Friendship is something that is potentially extremely transgressive, because it’s something where I have an attachment to this person that has no purpose for the preservation of a social order.”
This interview actually took place in 2023, and a lot has changed, politically at least, since then. Still, this feels pretty evergreen. Enjoy.
Spotify:
Apple Podcasts:
