HOW DIRTY THE HANDS THAT SAVE US?

So many ways to splice & dice our world. Male & female; Christian & Muslim; rich & poor; hands & head.

All over-simplifications to be sure, but they have their place in how we sort ourselves out. Like that last one. Humanity tends either to work mostly with its hands (AKA, blue-collar, hard-hat) or its head (AKA, white-collar, briefcase). There's overlap, of course, but you get the idea.

For most of history our species has worked by the ache of its hands and the sweat of its back. Then, especially with the industrial & scientific revolutions, a growing number of us began working with our heads. As we became more educated, mechanized, and in control of the world around us, more of us left the land. Left the tools. Left the sweating behind, and came to the great cities and entered their dirt-free professions.

Today, Americans have become steadily more engaged in abstractions. Like books, laws, portfolios, computer programs, R&D. The sweating is done by fewer and fewer. So that fewer and fewer of us actually MAKE things; more and more of us THINK things. Inevitably each population tends to consider the other the lesser of the two.

Some of us prefer bowling alleys to country clubs, domestic beer to rare wines, movies to operas, hot dogs to pheasant. Others drive luxury cars, own big homes, buy hedge funds, and get their kids into the Ivy League.

This division-of-labor and its consequent division-of-values was apparent from America's earliest literature where dapper easterners and dirty frontiersmen always stand out in sharp contrast. And while a taste for the good life is bone-deep in our people, pride in the hard life may be deeper. There's something enduring in our national mythos that sees the rugged, plain-spoken, hands-on doer as what made and still makes us great.

Picture Jack Nicholson vs Tom Cruise in the 1992 film A FEW GOOD MEN. Nicholson is the tough Marine officer charged with allowing a brutal code-of-honor to lead to a recruit's murder. Cruise is the idealistic, clean-deal lawyer indicting the old, pragmatic, get-it-done-anyway-you-can veteran. You feel intellectual pride in the principles espoused by Cruise; you feel moved by the guts-and-glory of the warrior who reminds us that while we sleep in our white sheets, his kind stand watch on the walls that protect us.

We respect Cruise; we need Nicholson. When a choice must be made, the film has Nicholson sent to prison. When we leave the courtroom with Cruise, we all have to struggle with a question. "In a brutish world, should we punish the brutes or ask them to protect us from what is still more brutish out here...?"