On a weekend lull before new political storms, what poet Randall Jarrell called “the sad heart at the supermarket” is filled with mixed emotions over American life, a tangle of instinctive knowing and willed ignorance he evoked 50 years ago.
“If we meet an honest and intelligent politician,” Jarrell wrote, “a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren’t like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.”
In that era, JFK would say, “You can’t beat brains.” But his own experience proved you sometimes could. David Halberstam devoted an ironically titled book, “The Best and the Brightest,” to how Kennedy intellectuals led the country into a Vietnam quagmire.
Now, in a time of overflowing opinions, the question comes back in haunting new forms, in dispiriting debate over elitism vs. common sense, rigorous analysis vs. raging prejudice, sophistication vs. aggressive ignorance.
As Todd Akin makes Mitt Romney look like an intellectual giant, Romney’s own emptiness becomes an irresistible target. Willingly or not, we are dragged into new versions of the old argument.
Why can’t we have better? Even, as in the VP contest, the lines of demarcation break down to mislabel Paul Ryan wonkiness and Joe Biden emotional outbursts, the categories don’t hold their own contradictions.
If we reduce national discussion to liberal soft-headedness/conservative common sense or liberal smarts/conservative stupidity, we broaden the national breach and narrow any ground for connection, let alone consensus.
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