Rick Santorum: Conservatives Will Never Have "Smart People On Our Side"
I swear, I thought this was an article from The Onion. But it's from Buzzfeed. And it's an accurate quote.
Reality has been out-Onioning The Onion for a while, to the point where I think they'll go out of business in the next few years. How can you mock the world when it consistently steals your punchlines?
I read the article, and still had a piece of doubt. Surely, this must be an elaborate hoax. What leader could be credibly anti-smart, especially a leader who was a credible Presidential candidate for a major party?
Then I saw the video.
I admit, I laughed. A lot. I laughed more than I had laughed at all of the stand-up comedy I had listened to today - and I listened to some absolute gems.
But then I thought a bit, partly triggered by some of the quasi-defenders on the thread. Some people, including some who strongly dislike Santorum, are on the thread are questioning whether the title is misleading. Do they have a point?
In a word, no.
In _____ words,
*breathes in*
Ok. First, it's a direct quote.
Second, it's pretty clear from the context that "smart" is supposed to have negative connotations. At the bare minimum, he is associating it with academics or expertise, and this is clearly evident within the context of the wider speech.
So "smart" is being used as an insult.
Oddly, my experience has indicated that you can call a person a lot of things and not have them be bothered, as long as you don't attack their intelligence. Once you question that, the reply you can expect is the communicative equivalent of a honey badger released in your pants, and said badger having been told that delicious termites exist somewhere within your entrails.
I could leave it at that. But I can't. Because at this point my laughter at the sheer ridiculousness of having been "Rick Roll'd" has given way to consuming rage that he, and a huge number of people in this country - and around the world - are serious. He's not a somnambulant stand-up comedian genius - he's fucking serious.
And another thing: put aside the blindingly breathtaking bullturd of trying to make "smart" a dirty word. When did "elite" stop being a compliment and start being derogatory? When did it get conflated with "elitist", which has a distinct meaning? In the world of policy, business, academics, and science, I HOPE the people leading an area of research, or for that matter, the country, are elite. I HOPE they are better than average. I HOPE they're smarter than I am. I HOPE people who enjoy large amounts of power, beauty, success, and responsibility are endowed with above-average capabilities.
I hope that, in part, because we've got some damn meritocratic values that are pretty fucking cemented into the foundation of our ideal of America.
I know we like to call them idiots and numbnuts, etc., and politics can be pretty stupid. It's fun, and mocking politicians is truly the only global sport. It's way more entertaining than watching dirty foreigners spend 90+ minutes chasing a sphere of white hexagons or black pentagons - or black hexagons and white pentagons... I care so little I didn't bother researching which it was - only to finish in a goddamn tie. As a good American, I don't do ambiguity - moral or athletic - well.
But there is a naive part of me - perhaps the part that still believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Justice For All - that believes elite (but not elitist) leadership is a desirable thing. Hell, there's a part of me that believes it operates at some level - hopefully higher than my pessimistic weltanschauung would have me believe.
Otherwise, the nation is truly fubar.
When, when, did the passion for individual sovereignty override any sense that some people have better knowledge over some things than other people? When did we start believing that movie stars have special insight into vaccinations, or psychotherapy, or anything that isn't fucking movies? Why, with such bitter irony, does a political slant against concepts of wealth transfer and affirmative action embrace the democratization of truth, debasing expertise into mere opinion?
It's not just an American thing, as Dara O'Briain, an Irish comic, points out. (He, by the way, studied physics and mathematics in college before going into comedy.)
The sad truth is, no, my opinions are not better than expertise. I think I know a lot about things, and certain things a great deal. But I'm not an expert in health policy, or fashion, or abstract expressionist art. I'm not even a goddamn expert in astronomy - I've only got a masters degree in it. I quit my PhD program in part because I had a vague sense of how fucking much I needed to know about a specific area, and how goddamn hard I'd have to work to get there, in order to be anywhere near a credible expert. And I didn't care enough, even about planets around other stars (which is pretty damn awesome, even by the lofty standards of astronomy), to do it.
I know more than other people, a lot of people, most people, about a lot of astronomy. But there are people who know more than me. And in order for society in general, and science in particular, to, you know, progress beyond rudimentary levels, I have to TRUST people that have more knowledge than I do. I have to. I can't research every goddamn thing; hell, memory is such that a good chunk of the things that I think I know, and think are well-founded, are probably partial or complete bullshit.
Yes, experts sometimes lie, or cheat, or fuck up. There's a measure of skepticism we have to learn. But at some point, I have to trust - or I become, in the most literal sense, some sort of paranoid schizophrenic.
I have to decide whether fluoridation is a massive conspiracy with untold health effects that aren't covered by my knowledge of chemistry, or if it really is something that is the product of (known) health and economic benefits outweighing against (known) health and economic costs.
Maybe I could speculate on the extent to which the cult of individualism is a coping response to a host of unresolved existential crises modern individuals face, or the possibility that it's a reaction/protest to cultural and religious sources of guilt and shame.
But I'm not an expert. I'm not elite. I'm not smart.
That doesn't preclude me from an incoherent opinion - the standards of fact-checking and refereeing are pretty low for blogs in general, and this one in particular.
But this is too long already. And I got some stupid, pointless-ass shit to do... like watch Youtube comedy clips. Better that than contemplating the intellectual suicide of our great nation.
Like Stephen K. Amos, I, too, am trying to find the funny side of life.
PS: If you actually clicked on "Rick Roll'd", congratulations. You've just Rick Rolled yourself, and you have no one to blame except you.
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