This is excellent. Some excerpts:
The odd thing about Smart People is that they all seem to know who they are. They recognize each other, instinctively. Actually, usually even non-Smart People (like me) can recognize them. The odder thing about the Smart People faction is that objectively they’re not always all that smart (although certainly some of them are), and there are some very smart people who don’t belong to it.
Barack Obama, for example, has obviously been crowned a Smart Person virtually from the moment he entered the national scene. Now, there is zero (0) evidence i can see that Barack Obama is all that smart, at least not any more so than tens of millions of other folks. But he is definitely a Smart Person. Even I can see that. Just look at how he…um…talks in soft tones while wearing a suit, raising his eyebrows in concerned ways, and being skinny (?). Well okay, it’s not clear how or why I or anyone else knows or thinks that he’s Smart, what is clear is that we just do.
This leads naturally to discussion of another Smart People obsession, which is that they can’t stand Dumb People. Nothing offends a Smart Person more than a Dumb Person being in any sort of position of power, prominence, happiness, comfort, or respect. The Smart Person nation went on an eight-year hissy fit about how Dumb George W. Bush was. Books were written about it, plays were performed about it, double albums were released about it, benefit concerts were given about it, people launched into deep depressions about it. There are probably at least some Smart People who expended 90% of their waking moments from 2000-08 having little more than variations and permutations of the single thought ‘George W. Bush is Dumb’ in their head. (And isn’t that oh so Smart to be fixated on that single idea for eight years? Sure seems Smart to me.)
And of course, this Dumbness obsession has recently been fully transferred to Sarah Palin. Indeed an accurate test for whether you’re in the presence of a Smart Person is to say the word “Palin”, step back, and see what happens. If that person says something normal like “Huh?”, “You mean Sarah Palin?”, or “What about her?”, that person may be normal or even Dumb. But if the person throws a hissy fit and starts talking about how Dumb Sarah Palin is, you know then and there that you’re talking to a Very Smart Person.
Climate Change also illustrates the Smart Peoples’ fondness for arguing in favor of the autocratic, near-dictatorial control over everyone elses’ lives (of Smart People). To a Smart Person, the concept that there can or should be limits on the sorts of things that Smart People in power should be able to do, regulate, decide, and dictate, would make no sense. Smart People are annoyed by the Constitution, for example (if they even think about it at all). Mention the Constitution to a Smart Person, suggest that it restricts government power to do this or that, and you’ll get blank stares (if they don’t just start talking about how Dumb you are for saying it). Sure, they’ll agree that the Constitution restricts the power of Dumb people in government, like George W. Bush, but we’ve got a Smart government now – so what’s the Constitution got to do with anything? They’ve got Smart stuff to do, like nationalize health care, bypass Congress to sign climate treaties, and set up international taxation so Americans’ money can be taken from them and sent overseas. All of that is very Smart stuff to do. What’s the Constitution got to do with any of it?
