September 4, 2008
Smart and Dumb
More than ever — really, ever — the race for the office of President of the United States is about smart and dumb.
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6 Responses to “Smart and Dumb”
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More than ever — really, ever — the race for the office of President of the United States is about smart and dumb.
6 Responses to “Smart and Dumb”
Leave a Reply
thank you, Patrick.
You’re welcome Deron. There’s a comment on that post that’s the basis for a blog post I’ve got cooking about why has it become “bad” to be smart and intelligent? What exactly has that become “evil”.
if you can’t win races on ideas, or facts, and if you turn off your brain so you can believe what you hear at church, intelligence is an evil that must be combated.
Well said, Deron. And of course I can’t resist jumping in here to say that anti-intellectualism is a program pushed by (some) intellectuals (if you want to sully the term by applying it to such people). The dumbing of America is fostered by those who want to strengthen the advantage won by their own expensive education. Hence the deliberate undermining of the public education system, so those who don’t need the funds necessary to send their kids to private schools will nevertheless receive them, even as their school taxes are cut. And no voucher system will ever actually support a poor family’s hopes for education. These people doing the undermining see it as a kind of social Darwinism, fashioned in such a way as to limit the questioning of authority. They want a malleable mass of humans who may be switched on and off by dint of long-term conditioning. In this way democracy speaks–but it is always the voice of the little man behind the curtain that is heard.
Many times, in my many jobs over the years, I have heard low-level employees say “Just look at the boss sittin up there in his fancy office–shit, I could sit in there just like him and knock down that big salary myself. How hard can it be?” These people believe that luck of some sort, rather than ability, is what drops one into a position of authority with its big rewards–and they are the dumbfucks who see something of themselves in the likes of Palin and McCain. Like Palin, they have not bothered to find out “what exactly the vice president [or president, for that matter] does every day,” before offering themselves–or a similar “regular” person–up for the job.
[...] As y’all have talked about before, this election really is becoming an issue of smart vs. dumb. [...]