The word, nomad, gets bandied about quite a bit these days, and it is not a complete misnomer. Still, nomadism about looking at scenery or living off an internet job in a van is only convincing to a degree. The latter don't need to move at all. They really just need affordable housing.
By luck I ran into a marvelous documentary at the local library, "People of the Wind." It is about real nomads in Iran. The whole family gets involved in droving and caring for the many animals in their herds. Most impressive to me were the scenes of the nomads pushing or carrying animals across a fast mountain stream. (This tends to be an expensive DVD if you try to buy it, but you can stream it for free at kanopy.com).
It feels so good to come across high quality DVDs at a library, especially at unlikely places. Why shouldn't librarians be more assertive about being curators, rather than just filling the shelves with standard trash movies?
It is ironic that I would say that, since on a national or global scale I distrust the top-down approach of globalist elites and all their ideological hobbyhorses. Even the Pima County AZ library annoys me with the leftist/democrat slant to its library collection.
But I am not the only person who has one slant on a global level and another slant on a more local level. There will always be a limit to my populism when you look at the "common man" realistically. For instance, it is easy to blame political leaders for eagerly rushing off to war, but the peasant masses make that so easy for them: give them some fearmongering about the evil foreigner, give them a fake incident or two, some slogans about a holy cause, give them some military bands, and the peasant hordes are swept up in war fever.
Or look at the peasant hordes' childlike belief in ancient superstitions. Their interest in literature is limited to trashy love stories. Their musical taste is just violent thumpah-thumpah pounding and hammering. In fact I probably wouldn't be a populist at all if the expert-class actually thought independently.
Sadly, being well-educated doesn't really lessen how sheep-like a mind can be. On top of that, it is easy for technical expertise to be suborned by self-interest, careerism, and politicized funding agencies.
Comments