It's Hip to Be Stupid

After an NBC reporter asked French President Jacques Chirac a question in French George Bush remarked, “The guy memorizes four words and he plays like he’s intercontinental.”

Our president is not a bright guy. From what I can see he didn’t have a single serious thought plague his over-privileged mind until he was well into his forties. Had he not been a member of the Bush oligarchy he would be harmlessly off somewhere doing whatever it is middle-aged frat rats do. His ascendancy to the throne is part of an orchestrated battle waged by the forces of intellectual sloth over erudition. He is not just uneducated, he is anti-intellectual.

We live in a culture devoid of public intellectuals. I can’t think of a popular figure in America who would be considered a thinker. The mere mention of the word intellectual brings out guffaws from a lot of people. Intellectuals are portrayed in our media as effeminate, elitist bores. It is getting to the point where anyone who conjugates a verb correctly is suspected of not being a regular guy, especially among athletes. If atrocious grammar and malapropisms are the mark of a regular guy then our president is as regular as Homer Simpson. The problem is that Homer is a parody, George Bush is our president.

Homer is a brilliant parody of dull-witted men but our popular culture is overflowing with portraits of imbeciles that are not parodies. Stupid people are often the heroes of movies. They triumph over pointy-headed intellectuals and save the day. I could give 100 examples in movies where the dim-witted archetype triumphs over erudition. I would be hard-pressed to name a movie in which an intellectual was portrayed in a favorable light, let alone one in which the intellectual was the hero.

If our movies do portray intelligent people they are generally of the freak show variety: geniuses with serious flaws to be overcome—think Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind. By intellectuals I am referring to mere mortals who have chosen a path of learning and thought. Name a movie where the characters talk about books or anything remotely high-minded.

We have even created an entire genre of film dedicated to the heroic nature of inferior intelligence. I find it odd that as a culture we feel that there is so much we can learn from people of child-like intelligence—think Forest Gump, Rain Man, I am Sam, Sling Blade, etc.. Adam Sandler has built a career out of portraying lovable, mildly-retarded goofs.

Hollywood serves up the portrait of the dumb, likeable type because it is a non-threatening message. Mustn’t make people feel stupid by using references they won’t understand. Mustn’t show people reading, else the public think they are expected themselves to read. Make people feel comfortable in their ignorance which is better than prodding them to think for themselves. Thinking may lead them to challenge what is slopped out to them on a daily basis and called entertainment.

Perhaps this anti-intellectualism is a result of a failure by our “cultural elite” (I fucking hate that term but use it as a linguistic shortcut) to speak in a voice that can be understood by everyone. Dickens was wildly popular in his time, as was Hemingway, and Joseph Heller. Tom Wolfe’s brilliant novel,The Bonfire of the Vanities, was a huge bestseller some fifteen years ago. Sometimes great artists are ignored by their generation but many times great art has had wide popular appeal.

There is a wonderful scene in the movie Amadeus where Mozart is sitting in a popular theater during the performance of one of Schikaneder’s vaudevilles. At one point the play onstage parodies one of Mozart’s arias from Don Giovanni, Là ci darem la mano and all of the peasants in the house begin singing Mozart’s song. Even though it was written for the opera, the "cultural elite" of the time, the beauty of this song was not lost on the common people and they knew it by heart. I think Hollywood constantly underestimates the intelligence of the public of today. That’s just my opinion.

These days it’s hip to be stupid and trivial. I’ll never forget watching Conan O’Brien’s show when he first came on the air. His guest was William F. Buckley. Here is a guy who has written more books than Conan has probably ever read and he copped this silly cooler-than-you attitude with Buckley. After a few minutes of pointless banter in which Conan was embarrassingly out of his league (embarrassing to watch that is, Conan is too hip to be embarrassed by his ignorance) Buckley got up from the couch and played a little Bach on the harpsichord. I had never seen Buckley play before but I knew he was a pianist from reading his writings. He represented to me about as close as you can get to being a renaissance man in our day and age. Kurt Vonnegut once referred to Buckley as the winner in the decathlon of life.

As Buckley played his piece Conan switched the monitors to a clip of Lurch from The Munsters playing the harpsichord. Conan has gone on to make quite a career out of kissing the asses of chimps like Sandler. I haven’t watched him since that show.