LAT op-ed, Ariel Dorfman: "Brainy Candidates Need Not Apply"

[DeepModem Mom]

COMMENTARY
Brainy Candidates Need Not Apply

By Ariel Dorfman, Chilean Ariel Dorfman has just published "Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations 1980-2004" (Seven Stories Press). Website: www.adorfman.duke.edu


Is John Kerry too intelligent to be president of the United States?

It was what I felt instinctively the first and only time I met him, at a lunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1998. He was subtle, full of cultural and historical references, elaborating each fine argument at length, with perception and nuance. I commented to one of his aides afterward that I regrettably thought his brains could turn out to be the biggest impediment to a man like him ever occupying the White House.

All these years later, with most polls still showing George W. Bush ahead of his opponent after three debates in which Kerry proved himself more articulate and thoughtful and flexible and able to understand an increasingly dangerous world, I am afraid I may have been right. Yet it still seems inconceivable to me that someone as incompetent, incoherent and obtuse as Bush could possibly command almost half the votes of his fellow countrymen.

Is it that Americans actually like Bush's know-nothing effect? Or is it that Kerry strikes Americans as too highbrow? As pretentious? Do they see his complexity as excessive effeminate suppleness?

This anti-intellectualism has, unfortunately, a long history in the United States....

***

.... Richard Hofstadter published his "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that explored the deep roots of this wariness toward anyone "who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows," as (Dwight) Eisenhower himself rather wittily phrased it....Anti-intellectualism had its origins, according to Hoftstadter, in American traits that anteceded the nation's founding: the mistrust of secular modernization, the preference for practical and commercial solutions to problems and, above all, to the devastating influence of Protestant evangelism in everyday lives. Anybody who cares to read this masterful book today may be astonished to see how it anticipates and even predicts the rise of the neoconservatives and Christian fundamentalism in contemporary Washington....

***

....(Ralph Waldo Emerson) wrote: "Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it."

The terror of life.

One can only hope that his fellow Americans, so many years later, will not be afraid of choosing as their leader a man who believes that the best way to defeat the multiple terrors of today and tomorrow is with an intelligence of which no human should ever be ashamed.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-dorfman22oct22,1,4240614.story

[libbygurl]

1. American anti-intellectualism continues to baffle me....

....I can't fathom why anyone would prefer a candidate "whom they can have a beer with" to one who shows genuine leadership and thoughtfulness in that leadership.

BTW, Hofstadter's book is a classic, a must-read!

Dorfman has written some excellent tomes, too!