So proud of being so dumb

WHAT happened to the once esteemed idea that each generation wanted its offspring to be better than they? My parents, and theirs, and theirs, all wanted the children to be better educated, live better lives, have better opportunities. And then something odd happened; Americans began to see educated Americans as a threat, as if having actual knowledge was a danger to Life, Liberty, and the American Way. This isn't just odd, it's tragic.

I remember back when Bill Clinton was running against George Bush, the Elder, for president. As one of many "filler" stories, the press wanted to know about favourite cookie recipes of Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton. Mrs Bush complied with cutesy press coverage and smiling youngsters. Ms Clinton, however, responded that she didn't make time for baking, that she had a (law) career that took much of her time. The result was a remarkable barrage of insulting responses to Ms Clinton, who had dared pronounce against motherhood, baking, children, and the sanctity of a woman;s place in the kitchen! Egad!

And as I watched the scene play out, I wondered: Who, among the many parents of daughters, would NOT be proud to have them attend a prestigious university, become scholars of note, attain law degrees, and procure a career and income that would pretty much guarantee that they would have a better, n more rewarding life than themselves? Who would tell a daughter who had been accepted to Harvard or Princeton that, no, they really should stay home and learn to crochet and bake cookies?

Ah, but Ms Clinton is not THEIR daughter. Bill Clinton is not THEIR kin. He's just one of the annoying, demented, Eastern Ivy-League Ivory-Tower Know-It-Alls. One of those people who think that because he's had access to the experience and tutelage of some of the finest and most educated people alive, he is somehow determined to undermine everything American for his own glory. Or so it seemed then.

Now, the GOP is still belittling the Ivory-Tower types, and the ones doing so ARE Ivory-Tower types! Bush I and II, and Mitt Romney are all products of those dreaded, communist towers of erudition, Harvard and Yale. It is an intellectual atrocity that they slander the almae matri that provided them the switch from silver spoons to golden ladles, but to then rile the electorate and have them believe that the pols were NOT part of that Academic Elite is almost unbelievable! Or at least it should be unbelievable; but the decades of fervent anti-intellectualism has taken its toll. Americans are getting... well, I'll just say they are not keeping up intellectually with much of the rest of the world. On the one hand, Americans decry the movement of jobs abroad, while they simultaneously lie prostrate across the road to the progress that they demand. 

"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge," wrote the late scientists and prolific author Isaac Asimov. It is sad that this attitude, that ANY opinion is as valid as one based on facts, is growing like a fungus among us, and I am not sure that enough people with the same concern will do anything to reverse it. 

"All it takes," wrote Edmund Burke, "for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing." Equally true, it seems, is that all it takes for ignorance to flourish is for educated men -- and women -- to do nothing. Judging by the puny resistance ignorance faces today, it would seem that we have plenty of good people happy to do nothing.

So, you see, there is SOMETHING that, in this recession, we have in plenty. Too bad. 

(To read my related article, visit:
Dr. Robert Sprackland. 2005 A Nation Left Behind Or A Nation Placing Itself Last. EzineArticles (December, 08), http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Nation-Left-Behind-Or-A-Nation-Placing-Itself-Last&id=109957)