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.
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