Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Jedediah Purdy is something Jefferson could never have foreseen: an oligarch in peasant's clothing, the son of upper-class hippies who moved to West Virginia in 1974, just in time to give birth to Jed, whom they bred as a weapon. They knew if their boy-weapon was to be effective, it couldn't be born in their native haunts--Beacon Hill, New Haven, Martha's Vineyard--so they sped south to the deepest, most wretched corner of Appalachia as this bucolic Damien's hour approached. Jed's mother was probably barking like a seal in her tenth hour of labor when their VW van zoomed through Trenton on the Interstate, with her hirsute spouse screaming at her, "God damn it, maintain! Maintain! You want the little brat to be born in New Jersey, for Christ's sake?" And Jed's mom, Spartan woman, clenched her teeth and legs and relaxed only when the van screeched over the river into West Virginia; then Jed came forth in a stream of long-pent folly and lies. They named the boy "Jedediah" so that it would be clear he was a son of the hard West Virginia earth, a real son of toil. Which of course he isn't. He is a poorly-constructed golem, magicked of dirtclods and coal tailings to fight his parents' lost battle. They raised the creature on a farm, no doubt purchased with the dividends of their discreet trust funds, and began pursuing their quaint, economically absurd agriculture: Ivy-League oligarchs plowing with horses and giving every goat a quaint name before they home-butchered it. They raised Jedediah without TV, without movies, without pop music--without a single link to the glorious cascade of our culture in its finest years. And he's proud of it! He boasts about not knowing anything of the culture in which he was born, and from which his parents kept him til he was too old to help! These people should be arrested for child abuse! Jed's own account innocently reveals his parents' gross hypocrisy. He tells us that his mother joined the local West Virginia school board, an example of grassroots political involvement he holds up as an example for us all. In the same breath, and without the least indication of embarrassment, he tells us that he did not attend the public schools his mother was serving: "Our parents taught my younger sister and me at home." And at fourteen, after this careful homeschooling, Jedediah (full name: "J. Cabot Getty-Dupont Purdy") went off to school. Where, you ask? Perhaps to the high school his mother had made into a shining example of public education? Did our Jed in fact ride the yellow bus to Drowned Rat Valley HS in Drowned Rat Township, W Va? Why no. Jed went off to a different school. You may have heard of it: Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. When he finished at Exeter, did Jed-Boy Walton go home to follow the plow, get hookworm and pick a banjo on the front porch? Why no. He went on to another humble institution of learning beloved of coalminers' sons: Harvard. Well, OK--but after Harvard, THEN he went home to eat possum around the family table and steal coal scraps to keep warm, right? No again. The inside back jacket informs us that Jed is "studying Law, environment, and social values at Yale." This is where you begin to think: they must be kidding. This can't be true. Not even East-Coast American conservatives are this stupid. But they published this silly boy's maunderings, so perhaps they are. Purdy writes about "the modern world" as if he's never been there, in a parody of heavy Johnsonian prose: "Several years later, MTV presented Beavis and Butthead, a cartoon whose eponymous antiheroes spend their time watching MTV...." "eponymous antiheroes"! As the "eponymous antiheroes" would put it: "Heh-heh--He said 'eponymous'!" Indeed he did. He's got a million of these gouty harrumphs, the sweepings of newspaper opinion pieces at their clunkiest. The closest he can get to describing Clinton's blowjob is "a leader's philandering." Jed worries about "recent centuries" and fears that "neoliberal policies...often make a Procrustean bed of economists' beloved supply-and-demand curves." They do, don't they? That's why I got a Posturpedic. Jed uses words which should be a felony for anyone under eighty. He introduces Ken Kesey as "...a literary character of sorts as leader of the madcap Merry Pranksters...." "madcap"? Jed, son, they warn't "madcap"; they was on DRUGS! (Has Jed ever taken a mind-altering substance other than self-righteousness? No. And he'd deny it if he had; his kind are great liars.) This book is two hundred pages long, but the primitive, reactionary argument occupies only about ten pages, the length of an undergraduate essay--which this thing clearly was before Jed inflated it. To make it book-length he's inserted a whole unrelated article on the destructive impact of stripmining coal, and another on Montaigne, with the odd nod to Rousseau. It's only fitting that Jed should pay homage to Rousseau because Jed's whole life and works derive from a single work of Rousseau: _Emile, ou de l'Education_. In _Emile_, Rousseau describes the ideal education of a boy kept ruthlessly away from the company of other children, popular culture, cities, and mass culture. This ideal pupil should be educated at home, by a single stern, Spartan teacher. By this regimen, Rousseau believed, a youth of natural goodness, free of the corruptions of society, would be created. It was this project which Jed's parents undertook, two hundred years later. This pitiable little book reminds us of an important truth: Rousseau was an idiot.