Nobody Likes A Smarty-Pants

To say there is a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in America is to understate the situation drastically. Just a brief listen to any TV news show, any political debate, or - God help us all - any reality show will reveal just how stupid it seems people have become. We get our information in 5-second sound bites, nothing better than topic sentences to 7th-grade term papers and then it's off to something new. It seems that Americans don't like anything too cerebral, they want to lead with their chin and wear their heart on their sleeve and leave the cipherin' to the few pasty pigeon-chested Melvins who aren't burly enough to make it in a man's world. After all, nobody likes a smarty-pants.
   And yet... everybody running for President wants to come across as the smartest person in the room. Without putting on airs or using big words. Or being distracted by facts.
   It distresses me. And I don't like to be distressed. How can so many people who want to hold the highest office in the land put so little work into actually THINKING about things? Don't you suppose that our President should put some real effort into understanding the way, say, the world economy turns and how that's tied into multi-national conglomerates and rampant political corruption?
   If I hired you to run a bakery, I wouldn't necessarily expect you to be a baker, but I would expect you to discover pretty quickly the details of how a bakery works. You'd need to learn fast, you'd need to be able to move from specifics to generalizations fairly easily, you'd need to deal with ambiguity and yet at the same time be able to employ what you already know to make the kind of decisions a bakery manager needs to make to get the dinner rolls out the door. And to do that you'd need to be a fairly smart person.
   Why should our President be any different? It's a much bigger job than bakery manager, with much higher stakes. And it's a job that really has no precedent, there's no apprenticeship for the Presidency. It is sui generis (look it up).
   We need one of JFK's 'best and brightest' in the Oval Office, not the 'least offensive of a miserable selection.' We need someone who doesn't pretend to have answers to problems they clearly don't understand. We need someone who is willing to listen and learn and use their brains to solve problems. No more talking heads who get their opinions and policies from focus groups.
   I'm old enough to remember when ignorant people were ashamed of their ignorance, now dolts and simpletons wear their foolishness like a badge of honor. It's time to chase the trolls back under the bridge. Our nation's founding fathers were the smartest of the smarty-pants of their generation, and we do them and our country and injustice when we accept anything less for ourselves.