[It]was a complex speech. It was a, kind of a speech that could be taught in a college course on just war and America's role in the world.Reading the comments of some our chittering anonymice in the prior post put me in mind of the good Mister Smith's post, linked above. Liberal credentialism is really his beat, not mine, so I will only pause to note that one of liberal America's most pitiable traits is its abject fawning at the feet of our Ivy-League gate-keepers and their unimpeachable issue. Unimpeachable, that is, as long as they issue one of us.
-Katarina van den Heuvel on The Obama's Nobel chat
Wow! It "could be taught in a college course"! Say no more! The man is one of us.
Being President may make you stupid; but liking the President gives you a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. Katrina is probably not a born fool, but deep commitment and hard work have made her a virtuoso of fatuous gaga
-The inimitable Mister Smith on Katarina van den Heuvel
Actually, Barry O's Maimonidean perspicacity may be the last liberal sacred cow, at least judging by the reactions of my own liberal acquaintances and the few progressive types we've yet to fumigate from our own subterranean comments section. It is now acceptable, if not accepted, to propose that The Obama is a coporate-hack warmonger busy bloodying the world and fucking over the workers in the names, variously, of GE, Exxon, Lockheed Martin, Jesus Christ, Pharma, Big Insurance, and Goldman Sachs, but heaven and all the choirs of angry angels forfend that you suggest he's a moron to boot. The arguments for his preternatural intelligence seem to me to have all the weight of the argument for paying Citibankers their trillion dollar bonuses, i.e. that they must be worth it, else they wouldn't be worth it. It is, in other words, basically an argument by question begging, although I suppose in Obama's case there is also the . . . . evidence of . . . the . . . thoughtful . . . pause.
Oddly enough, the liberal QED for the proposition that Obama must be named to the national honor roll, though it yet remains uncertain whether he will attain to the true heights of human genius, seems to be that he edited Harvard Law and then taught at the University of Chicago, which might make one pause to consider replacing this whole representative democracy business with something more closely resembling the tenure committee.
Or maybe that's already been accomplished.
The great Institutions of American higher ed are not designed to produce intelligence, after all, nor even to reward it. They are designed to produce and perpetuate an Establishment. Intelligence is irrascible, iconoclastic, prickly, argumentative, and reactionary. It resembles a gaggle of Frenchmen at a dinner party, not a Cabinet meeting. It rankles; it doesn't conciliate. It certainly doesn't become the President of the United States. Good Lord, here is Bill Clinton, Rhodes scholar, surely the most . . . supple-minded of recent presidents, calling Tom Friedman "our most gifted journalist at actually looking at what is happening in the world and figuring out its relevance to tomorrow" and praising Malcolm Fucking Gladwell as one of our most "penetrating" thinkers. Which is to say, a smart guy by the lights of the Times book review, but not exactly a mind for the ages, eh?
The point here being: what exactly is the evidence of Obama's mental acumen? Granted, the guy speaks at least as well as your average VP of Marketing; he does not slur his words; he appears to have mastered what we might have called fourth-grade geography before they stopped teaching geography. As evidence of depth of intellect, breadth of consideration, sagacity and wisdom, however, is his output not lacking? His celebrated speech on race was callow when he gave it and seems ever more so in retrospect, the sort of blacks-see-it-this-way, whites-see-it-that way that, repackaged and repurposed, might reasonably make an opening act at your local Funny Bone. His innaugural was like a teleconference pep talk with a few bowdlerized Kennedyisms (and what was JFK but another Harvard mediocrity?) thrown in. His Nobel speech would have been morally monstrous were it not so utterly incoherent. He is probably a fine spokesmodel, but insisting on his brains because of his Harvard pedigree is dusting off a just-so story and calling it truth.
42 comments:
His book wasn't too bad.
i don't want to jinx it by naming it, but...
what are the odds you don't get pushback here bc you directly confronted them on the last sacred cow? that seems to be the way of the beast, no?
I think part of the problem is defining what Obama's goals are so we can evaluate how intelligently he has gone about them.
bonecrusher, are you referring to the book we're sure is ghost-written or the one merely alleged to have been ghost-written?
Dreams - I assume this is the alleged one. The only allegations I've ever heard of were the crazy Ayers ones, but I'm hardly an expert on the issue.
Well, we have the QED of our own here - no smart, non-sociopathic person wants to be or can even function as president, Barry is president, therefore he is either a sociopath or fundamentally dumb. I accept that, but its just as question begging as the converse.
Anyway, point being, if going to fancy schools, rising to positions of prestige and authority within academic settings and so on are not evidence of some kind of intelligence, then what would be? I ask not because I think he is a genius, I haven't put much thought into the question and it strikes me as kind of a weird thing to get hung up on. I also agree that based on his public speeches that are fundamentally monstrous or incoherent but have the virtue of sounding warm and enlightened if you kind of squint your ears and mind, sort of like how the innocent sounding song Afternoon Delight betrays a carnal message, that he is not impressive as a public intellectual. But the question remains for me, what would be evidence of this and how could he satisfy it? We are back to square one, of course the burden is upon the people who posit that he is a genius to provide some kind of evidence. For some, going to Harvard and being a law professor is evidence. Keep in mind that people who have not gotten higher education do not understand that success is more a function of your ability to eat shit for a long time and not get drunk too much rather than intellectual acumen, that is and forever will be enough.
See, Bush was a moron. Grace Slick was the second singer, Signe Anderson being the first, he forgot Jack Cassidy, he got Kantners name wrong, and he - like most Americans - completly forgot poor Skip Spence.
"if going to fancy schools, rising to positions of prestige and authority within academic settings and so on are not evidence of some kind of intelligence"
I can look back on a life of achievement, on challenges met, competitors bested, obstacles overcome.
and the few progressive types we've yet to fumigate from our own subterranean comments section.
IOZ is a Nazi!
Fucking Nazis. Nothing ever changes.
Well, fine, we throw out his education. then we throw out his career. Then we throw out his manner of speaking. Now we have no evidence.
Oh, except becoming president requires some kind of intelligence, usually, especially when you grow up poor and black.
But, really, you just define dumb as anyone who doesn't see things the way you do anyway. What's the point? What's your evidence that he's dumb? Because he's contradictory in his political stances? You could so easily argue that you HAVE to be contradictory in order to appease the mercurial and unforgiving American public.
I find it amusing as hell that all these people are arguing over the intelligence of all these men, about whom we only learn about through information that winds its way over a tortuous path, pawed by hands clean and grubby.
My guess is that Obama is pretty smart, mostly based on his accomplishments. Yes, academia (and everything) is largely just going through motions. You still have to be mildly intelligent to go through those motions. Bush was probably fairly intelligent, but just immature and lazy. Who fucking knows, though.
The problem in all of this is that everyone is stupid. People are fucking terrible decision makers. Calling anyone "smart" can only be done by comparison, and being smart by comparison is a pretty mean feat.
So, really, the only "stupid" people are the ones that think they aren't.
Oh, hai!
if dancin' w/them whut brung you is a sign of intelligence, raygun, shrub 1 & 2, bill c. and bho are geniuses. the ceo of g. sachs probably has a much better clue about how "smart" bush or obama really is, and thinks a hell of a lot less of that issue than us peasants bedazzled w/the spectacle of power.
On a weekday?
FOR THE MOTHERFUCKING JESUS CHRISTITUDINAL LOVE OF GAIA'S VAGINA, WOULD PEOPLE PLEASE LOOK UP THE DEFINITION OF 'SMART' AND 'INTELLIGENT' AND NOTE THE DISTINCTION.
CHRIST ON A POGO BALL.
Obama has institutional smarts, he doesn't have institutional intelligence, if there even is such a thing!
It certainly takes something to be the king of tools.
That and a pair of testicles.
I only mention it 'cause some- times there's a man--I won't say a hee-ro, 'cause what's a hee-ro?--but sometimes there's a man.
Some Chinaman took them from me in Korea.
"Oh, except becoming president requires some kind of intelligence, usually, especially when you grow up poor and black." No it doesn't. Jackson was pratically illiterate. And is the implication that Obama grew up poor, and that he's black?
Intelligence as some sort of monolith is a laughable fallacy; a presumption that one's analytical ability, as assessed by metrics propounded for the purpose, is unique, rather than particularly useful to various ends. Which is to say that Monsieur's takedown misses the mark just as much as the pwoggie annointment.
"Intelligence" is dependent on one's frame of reference, and is only a meaningful adjective relative to the application.
One can see this distinction by focusing on a particular decision or set of preferences (as opposed to the cobbled mass, which is weighed against the weigher's cobbled mass to assess "intelligence" - and then weighed against a duck to see if its a witch). Was the BO intelligent in the context of law school? Undoubtedly so. Was this an intelligent fashion choice? Undoubtedly not.
The BO's prescriptions for Afghanistan and American foreign policy are also obviously stupid. But they do not betray a lack of intellect, but rather a flaw common to many applications: presuming your conclusion. The BO has so internalized the idea that America is just and right and good that, much like every other American, no amount of intelligence could possibly make it otherwise.
One of the requirements for higher office is that you have unquestionably accepted that America is teh good. So is the BO an intelligent president? No. But no president will be.
> Intelligence as some sort of monolith is a laughable fallacy
This is empirically untrue. Levels of achievement in various areas are very highly correlated.
The major exception is social acumen, as I would know.
The heck with presidents. This fruited lamb recipe is amazing.
Alas, he's a politician, and even worse for him, he's in a position where he's gotta deliver, so he's gonna fail some tests of virtue. Yes, alas that we have such a person as president, as opposed to some feasible alternative.
Or not.
Hey, let's give Obama some credit here: He is perfectly capable of making a speech that is morally monstrous.
Also, I second la rana.
I think it's high time we bring down "institutions of higher learning"--I and I say Harvard should be top of the hit list.
But they do not betray a lack of intellect, but rather a flaw common to many applications: presuming your conclusion.
I am somewhat confused as to how a seemingly unchecked tendency to beg the question does not betray a lack of intellect.
I tend to think Obama has at least as much candlepower as a good staff writer for the New Yorker, take that as you will.
Oh, except becoming president requires some kind of intelligence, usually, especially when you grow up poor and black.
If by 'poor' you mean 'a wealthy student at an elite prep school' and 'black' you mean 'not black,' then... what do you mean?
Thanks as always for the kind words, cher confrere.
Intelligence is overrated. It can in fact be a negative quality, if you find it in someone who's an enemy of the human race, like any US president is, ex officio.
Surely we would rather have stupid enemies than smart ones?
But this is a thought experiment. Neither intelligence nor any other human quality is really at play here. These are institutions we're dealing with, not people. Institutions find staff who are intelligent enough to do the necessary job at any given time. A smarter guy seems to have been needed this time around, to lull the disaffected intelligent back into compliance. Worked like a charm.
Obie is certainly smarter, both in the SAT sense, and the mother-wit sense, than Bush. But so what?
And yeah, there's smart and then there's smart. I've known quite a few law-school profs and Rhodes scholars, and they certainly weren't the smartest people I've known -- though they were smarter than George Bush, for what that's worth.
This is empirically untrue. Levels of achievement in various areas are very highly correlated.
Funny–I can look back on a life of achievement, on challenges met, competitors bested, obstacles overcome. I’ve accomplished more than most men, and without the use of my legs.
And Michael Smith is (partially) making my point.
IOZ if this were 1995 and you were an Upper West Side nouvelle cuisine restauranteur, I would give you 5 gold stars for presentation on this one.
Food was pretty good too.
Is Charles F. Oxtrot not from NYC? Upper West Side nouvelle cuisine in 1995? The Upper West Side was a culinary wasteland in 1995. So was Brooklyn. Wasn't no "nouvelle cuisine. Ah, the good old days. Giuliani ruined everything...
But yeh, the IOZ is right: Ivy League schools are all about perpetuating a bland and hateful establishment. I spent the better part of a decade at one of them, so my knowledge of the issue is hard-earned. You CAN become very well-educated at such a place, but you have to go out of your way to do it. Such a school is kind of like a big museum --- you CAN learn a lot if you apply yourself and visit a lot, but 99.99999% of the visitors are just tourists and knuckleheads.
"Anyway, point being, if going to fancy schools, rising to positions of prestige and authority within academic settings and so on are not evidence of some kind of intelligence, then what would be?"
In addition to the argument against the concept of 'i' as intelligence reified, or the meaning of intelligence, etc, etc, all of which I'm totally down with....
What this boils down to, especially in the liberal blogs, is that Obama espouses a basic level of conversational competence. One would not be embarrassed to list Barrie as a friend, as it were, given that he can do such a nice turn of phrase.
I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to this point of view - G-Dub was REALLY fucking embarrassing - but at this point, it's all the guy has going for him anymore. Yes, he espouses Wilsonian interventionism in its demonstratively-wrong-for-everyone-but-US-imperialist forms, but dammit, he doesn't sound like a total fucking moron saying it!
"Yes, he espouses Wilsonian interventionism in its demonstratively-wrong-for-everyone-but-US-imperialist forms, but dammit, he doesn't sound like a total fucking moron saying it!" And maybe if Bush was a little more literate, he wouldn't have had a shoe thrown at him.
As Barry's college classmate(Columbia '83), notwithstanding that I probably got better grades than he (as if said mattered as a measure of intelligence... I'll be the first to testify that it does not)... let me just say that Barry was smart enough never to saddle himself with an actual soul-crushing job, or more importantly, with any kind of a paper trail. And let's face it: how he set himself up as the ultimate political tabula rasa displaying a far greater "intelligence" than anything else we can point to in doing so.
Having expectation of more intellectual pyrotechnics (or, as his presidency will prove beyond doubt, having any expectation of anything at all from him), from such a man who has so flawlessly devoted his entire existence to advancement within the establishment by not having any record... seems... "naiive" at best.
In a nation where actually doing anything (besides executing dark skinned and/or retarded prisoners, of course) makes you "controversial" (and hence "unelectable")... Barry was almost designed to be our leader. The self-minded discipline on his part, never to write anything besides a self-serving memoir [is it conceivable that a president of a major law review and supposed teacher of law could never, ever write anything down commenting on the law?]... is nothing short of brilliant.
I respectfully dissent from the primary thesis espoused; what Barry has pulled off-- fatuous and dishonest (and yes, EVIL) Nobel speech notwithstanding.
So, uh, is there a choice other than IOZ's moron and the dawg's genius supervillain who deftly avoided handing out syllabuses when teaching at Chicago, or something? ("Ernst Stavro Obama knew that his poly sci teachers would bronze everything he wrote in 1982-3 in expectation of his inevitable run for president; hence, his brilliant plan to turn in blank pages for full credit. Mua-HA-ha-ha-haaaaaa!!!") Can we go with "Fairly smart, but frequently amoral in serving his own ambition"? Or even "Stupid like a fox"? Which, come to think of it, might apply to the previous guy, too. For such an abject idiot, the W sure seems to have made out okay.
I do not hail from Manhattan and am grateful for that. Cities are festering zoos and Manhattan is the festering-est with its mix of over-achievers fighting with the under-paid over what tiny table scraps remain after the Masters of the Universe finish playing with everyone else's money. All concrete and asphalt and girders and bricks and "architectural stone tiles"... Artifice, we have made our tribute to you!
Picking UWS 1995 was a joke, Nonny. Is that clearer now? Jokes have to be spelled out?
But, really, you just define dumb as anyone who doesn't see things the way you do anyway.
This is true. It's becoming something of a cliche in your writing, IOZ, that you have to throw in the gratuitous putdown of someone else's intelligence when it would be better left implied. Yes, yes, we know, dear, you're the brainiest dude in the Western hemisphere. You don't have to preen about it every time you point out that someone else is wrong.
Just look at the parking lot!
You don't have to preen about it every time you point out that someone else is wrong.
This seems to be . . . somehow . . . a bit of . . . projection.
Not that I disclaim the title, mind you. I mean, if the shoe fits and all. But in this particular post?
Last sacred cow. Like I said.
I would expect intelligence to be correlated with social acumen as well. It has been alleged that the greatly expanded cognitive capacity of homo sapiens was due to the importance of social interaction that came with the invention of language and primitive societies.
Ordinary language philosopher Gilbert Ryle pushed for a redefinition of intelligence away from logical thinking and understanding and towards, essentially, effectiveness in achieving one's goals. This is probably a better measurement, but it's not the one that the prog-bloggers are using in regards to Obama. After all, by that logic, Obama and Bush are roughly as intelligent as one another, as both set out to become president and both achieved that goal.
And Bush got re-elected, so that would probably make him smarter.
Nutella, Nutella, Nutella: Oh, except becoming president requires some kind of intelligence, usually, especially when you grow up poor and black. You were doing a little better for a while, but then you backslid. I would suggest that George W. Bush (though he isn't poor nor black) and any number of other BO's predecessors show that it doesn't take a lot of intelligence, however you define it, to become president. Or to rise in hierarchies generally.
M. le IOZ said it well here.
America is a wrestling picture IOZ. You don't have to type your soul into it.
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