Richard Hofstadter and Sebastián Gatti

Richard Hofstadter was an intellectual.

Today I read Sebastián Gatti in La Jornada de Oriente, a newspaper in Mexico. He is a Public Intellectual.

I am an online intellectual. Only for some days I put my ideas in La Jornada de Oriente. As it happened, I left Mexico and my university stopped hosting this paper in our server.

Professor Hofstadter wrote a classic book "Anti-intellectualism in American Life". Maybe the frontier, maybe the colonial stage, I really don't know. Nevertheless American Europeans like myself, do not have the Intellectual habits our Europeans counterparts have. Sebastián and myself are not full professors at universities as Hofstadter was. Nevertheless we feel like this American historian, that we have a responsibility. We think more than the average person, so we write, hoping that somebody will read us and benefit. It is a responsibility.

Hofstadter pointed out that the intellectual in American public life does not have as much weight as other actors. I can think of the American president getting into shouting matches with basketball players. With due respect, neither Donald Trump nor LeBron James have the education to help Americans think better. I can see that little kids love sports but at some point grownup men, yes usually men, should go to Community College, and so many other avenues they have, to improve themselves, and they choose to spend hours, and hours watching balls going around a sport court.

Going back to Puebla, where Gatti lives, he writes (his piece is in Spanish, he was born in Argentina and lives in Puebla City) that his child going out on his bike to pickup a few friends to help others during the recent earthquake in that beautiful city, is something he supports more than government agents getting in the way.

Things get complicated, don't they?

We intellectuals try to make sense of everything!

We keep trying, I hope you keep coming back.