Exulting in Complexity

Barack Obama "exults in complexity," said Nicholas Kristof today in his NYT column, sounding as if he was feeling a mix of excitement and relief. I second those emotions.

It is so refreshing, on so many levels, to see pride in learning return to the White House. Or it will be, come January when we can listen to a president who "speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites" and trust that he actually gets what he is talking about.

I was feeling pretty despondent on this topic in late September when the Palin pick was fueling an angry surge of people proud of being unschooled. It drove me to my own impatient essay, It's the Complexity Stupid, in which I wondered out loud how anyone sane could question the need to marshall the best of minds in the worst of times.

America has long had an anti-intellectual strain in which "careful deliberation is for sissies," Kristof notes wryly as he tracks this theme back through U.S. history. His essay, Obama and the War on Brains, is well worth the time to click through and read.

Comments

[CulturalTrendsWatcher]

Interesting post and blog. Relevantly, many prominent experts and publications have pointed out that Obama is part of Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and GenXers.
This link takes you to a page you may find interesting: it has, among other things, excerpts from publications like Newsweek and the New York Times, and videos with over 25 top pundits, all talking specifically about Obama’s identity as a GenJoneser:
http://www.generationjones.com/2008election.html