Okay, I\u2019m officially sick of it.\u00a0 For eight years, George W. Bush consistently, if not purposely, mispronounced \u201cnuclear,\u201d \u201cremnant,\u201d and a whole host of other words.\u00a0 Many people would accuse me of being an intellectual elitist for holding this against him.\u00a0 I do not consider myself an intellectual elitist.<\/p>\n
Now, Rick Santorum is raising anti-intellectualism to new heights\u2013or is it depths?\u00a0 He says that President Obama wants all Americans to go to college because Obama wants all Americans brainwashed by liberal college professors.<\/p>\n
WHAT?\u00a0 ARE YOU KIDDING ME?\u00a0 I went to college, and the point of it is not <\/em>to indoctrinate, but to get students to think through problems.\u00a0 Look, as a moderate I have a lot of problems with Obama, but when you tell me that he\u2019s trying to indoctrinate people by sending them to college, then you\u2019ve crossed over into the Twilight Zone, Rick.<\/p>\n Note to Republicans: If you want to win this race, or at least you want moderates to vote for you, then this kind of stuff has to stop.<\/p>\n Second note to Republicans and everyone who agrees with this: you want America to compete in the global economy?\u00a0 You want us to be at the top of the heap again after becoming a laughingstock in the last 30 years?\u00a0 Here\u2019s a hint: we need to embrace intellectualism, achievement, and just plain horse sense instead of condemning accomplishment as \u201celitist.\u201d\u00a0 You love that sort of name-calling, and I get it, but there was once another school that condemned intellectual achievement.\u00a0 They called it Communism.\u00a0 Don\u2019t believe me? Read Marx.\u00a0 (By the way, Nazis did that, too.)<\/p>\n I miss the old halcyon days when being halfway intelligent was considered a good thing.\u00a0 Bush paid lip service to \u201cNo Child Left Behind,\u201d but then turned around and established a role model for America\u2019s youth that makes my skin crawl.\u00a0 I heard him give a commencement speech at Yale in which he boasted of being a poor student and saying that it had not hurt his career.\u00a0 Stupidity is not a crime, certainly, and neither is knowledge of one\u2019s own stupidity.\u00a0 On the other hand, the idea that we should be proud <\/em>of our own stupidity is beyond me.<\/p>\n I have many Republican friends who complain that we want to upgrade the school system and that our answer is to spend more money on the schools.\u00a0 They say that spending money is not necessarily the right answer.\u00a0 After all, many of the industrialized countries of the world spend less per capita than we do on our children, and somehow they beat us in standardized testing.\u00a0 Maybe \u201call them foreigners\u201d are elites.<\/p>\n Perhaps we are victims of a sick culture.\u00a0 We have a culture today that appears to celebrate stupidity.\u00a0 Any kind of thoughtful examination is sacrilege.\u00a0 Introspection is for the weak.\u00a0 But it goes deeper than that.\u00a0 In our culture and in our media, people who are <\/em>intellectuals are portrayed as geeks and social misfits.\u00a0 They are people to avoid.\u00a0 To be sure, there are a great number of intellectual people who are socially maladjusted.\u00a0 However, that is a generalization about as fair as those who portray people from the South as possum-eating hicks.<\/p>\n When was the last time a major film depicted the scientist as a hero?\u00a0 We get Jeff Goldblum in the Jurassic Park<\/em> series, perhaps, but (much as I like Goldblum) his gawky look typifies the geeky intellectual that Hollywood goes after.\u00a0 Goldblum doesn\u2019t get the girl at the end of the picture.<\/p>\n I am generally of the opinion that Hollywood reflects society rather than shaping it.\u00a0 If we look at the history of scientists or intellectuals portrayed in the movies, we see that they were mad scientists (Rudolf Klein-Rogge in Metropolis<\/em>) in the 1920s, a little more controlled in the 30s, but still mad and over the top (Colin Clive in Frankenstein<\/em>), and morphed into the diligent doctor who had good intentions but not enough ethics and foresight (Boris Karloff in The Man with Nine Lives<\/em>) by the 1940s.\u00a0 But in the 1950s, a new type of scientist emerged.\u00a0 The kind of scientist we so desperately need as a role model for America\u2019s youth of today.\u00a0 Richard Carlson!<\/p>\n Carlson (1912-1977) was admittedly not the greatest actor ever to grace the screen.\u00a0 His screen career was marred with a plethora of sub-par early roles, although he did surface in Bob Hope\u2019s The Ghost Breakers <\/em>(1939).\u00a0 His true breakthrough role came in 1953 when he was cast as the heroic scientist in It Came From Outer Space <\/em>(1953).\u00a0 This was followed by appearances in other classic 50s fare like The Magnetic Monster <\/em>(1953), and The Creature from the Black Lagoon <\/em>(1954).\u00a0 In most of his appearances, Carlson played an earnest, handsome scientist who used his brains to get through the movie.\u00a0 He was not insensitive to those who were less learned than he (especially hot chicks like Julia Adams), but rather, he worked with everyone to get the right answer.<\/p>\n Carlson was so successful at this type of role that he was recruited for a lamentably short series of \u00a0films made by Bell Telephone in the late 1950s.\u00a0 Bell felt that the best hope for young Americans was to pursue and understand the sciences.\u00a0 Wanting to promote these ideas, they did the same thing that the US Government had done in the 1940s to explain WWII to the masses.\u00a0 They hired the best director they could afford, Frank Capra, and then Capra hired top creative people to help him make films that promoted science in the schoolroom. \u00a0(It should be noted that Mr. Capra was nobody’s liberal.)<\/p>\n Carlson appeared in Our Mr. Sun <\/em>(1956), about the sun, Hemo the Magnificent<\/em> (1957), about the circulation of blood, The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays <\/em>(1957), and The Unchained Goddess <\/em>(1958) about weather and ways of measuring it.\u00a0 These films are today minor classics in the field of education.\u00a0 In most of them, Carlson appears as an inquisitive scientist or reporter, and is aided by real life intellectual Dr. Frank Baxter.\u00a0 At interludes we are treated to explanatory cartoon segments directed by Road Runner creator Chuck Jones.<\/p>\n Carlson typified a type of character not seen today.\u00a0 He was a manly intellectual, unafraid of his intelligence, ready to use it to help others.\u00a0 The 1950s offered many similar characters.\u00a0 One need only look to Gene Barry\u2019s scientist in War of the Worlds <\/em>(1953) or Kevin McCarthy\u2019s kind but wise doctor in Invasion of the Body Snatchers <\/em>(1956). \u00a0 While sometimes there were unethical or stupid scientists in these films, the heroes were always the smart ones and they got the girl.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t the drooling geek scientists of today.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, this kind of 1950s character did not live long.\u00a0 By the time Star Trek <\/em>got hold of the idea, they had split the character into the stoic scientist, Mr. Spock, and the action-minded pseudo-intellectual Captain Kirk.\u00a0 It was never to be the same afterward.\u00a0 Even the early James Bond movies presented Bond as a smart (albeit pompous) guy who was only slightly less capable than his superiors.\u00a0 Bond would often attend a meeting with his boss only to turn the tables and end up lecturing the lecturer.\u00a0 It was also a creative bit of screenwriting that helped advance the plot while amusing the audience. \u00a0Later on, this bit of character was dropped, and Bond became more mindless and action-oriented, rather like the films themselves.<\/p>\n Despite the spin that Pat Robertson would put on things, these 50s movies did not <\/em>disdain faith in a higher power.\u00a0 Certainly we can point to the preacher in War of the Worlds <\/em>who gets fried by a Martian ray early on.\u00a0 He\u2019s quoting Bible verses as he walks toward the aliens, who take one look at him and open fire.\u00a0 But the point here is that he gets fried not because his faith is wrong, but because he is so stupid<\/em>!\u00a0 Later on, the survivors of a wrecked city gather in a church to pray together, including the scientist, and those pesky Martians are eventually killed by Earth\u2019s bacteria, those things that, according to the film\u2019s narrator, \u201cGod, in his wisdom, put upon the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n This hammers home producer George Pal\u2019s point that faith is helpful, and that reason is helpful.\u00a0 Gene Barry\u2019s scientist is fairly powerless to help against the onslaught, and the minister who blindly quotes the Bible is even more useless.\u00a0 Perhaps the combination of faith and <\/em>reason is helpful.<\/p>\n And this brings us back to the present day.\u00a0 If we bring up reasoned arguments against Republican policies, then we are branded as unfeeling, unpatriotic people.\u00a0 We can argue all we want about the facts that we have spent too much money in Iraq, that our goal of getting cheap oil has not worked, that our goal of getting the Iraqi people freedom has not (thus far) worked, that our goal of making the world a more peaceful place has not worked, and that our ideal of keeping nuclear nations from proliferating is not working.\u00a0 Bringing up these reasonable facts is not unpatriotic.<\/p>\n The Republicans are throwing faith without reason <\/em>at us.\u00a0 By doing so, they are\u00a0 being as naive as the preacher who walked straight at the Martians.\u00a0 Alas, reason without faith<\/em> can equally unattractive.\u00a0 Can we have a balance?\u00a0 Can we all just get along?\u00a0 Do we have to call each other names and ignore a point of view just because it belongs to the other party?<\/p>\n The thing that saddens me is that anti-intellectualism has caught on like wildfire.\u00a0 We were even sold the idea that Bush was the kind of guy you\u2019d like to have a beer with (although I shudder to have a beer with an alcoholic).\u00a0 So what?\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t qualify him to be the leader of the free world.<\/p>\n The leader of the free world needs to be a person who understands faith and reason, who thinks before talking, who contemplates before acting.\u00a0 He needs to be smart but not condescending, sensitive but not weak.\u00a0 He needs to be not the kind of guy you\u2019d want to have a beer with, but the kind of guy you\u2019d like to pass on the street and breathe a sigh of relief that he\u2019s looking out for your way of life.\u00a0 He needs to promote healthy intellectual activity as a necessary American trait and not one of geeks who will never get a date.<\/p>\n I want a president who knows that, no matter how much money we spend on schools, we\u2019ll never get great academic achievement unless our culture changes to reflect a value in education.\u00a0 We need to find that the classic rugged American individualism does not necessitate ignorance as well.\u00a0 People who celebrate stupidity need to be the dateless wonders of the next generation, and the smart guys who should be running things need to start doing so.<\/p>\n In short, we need Richard Carlson for President.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay, I\u2019m officially sick of it.\u00a0 For eight years, George W. Bush consistently, if not purposely, mispronounced \u201cnuclear,\u201d \u201cremnant,\u201d and a whole host of other words.\u00a0 Many people would accuse me of being an intellectual elitist for holding this against … Continue reading