It finally hit me today. I was taking a long walk, from North Cambridge down to Lechmere Square, thinking about nothing in particular, when I realized why I have a visceral dislike of the current president of the United States. It’s not because he’s an evangelical Christian, because I get along quite well with other evangelicals. It’s not because I’m a fiscal conservative, because you can make the case that wartime calls for deficits and besides I can understand that the temptation for deficit spending is more than most politicians can resist. It’s not because I’m a pacifist, because I know full well that most politicians do not follow the non-violence teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, my spiritual leader. These are areas where I simply happen to disagree with policies that can be justified.<\/p>\n
No, the reason I have a visceral dislike of Mr. Bush is that he is an anti-intellectual. I know, it’s ironic that he’s an anti-intellectual given that he is the product of an elite university that practically oozes intellectualism. Even so, he affects that down-home I’m-really-not-that-smart attitude, and he makes his affectation implicitly condemn anyone who claims to be smart. Not that I blame him for affecting an anti-intellectual attitude. Anti-intellectualism has always been a minor part of the United States mythos, and in the past couple of decades it has become a dominant element in the political life of this country. Mr. Bush is just one of many United States politicians who have decided to affect anti-intellectualism in order to win votes.<\/p>\n
This prevalent anti-intellectual attitude has even managed to influence me — I’ve become more and more cautious about claiming to be an intellectual. So I’ve changed the tag-line for this blog to “Adventures of a post-Christian heretic and unashamed intellectual.”<\/p>\n
Let’s all go out and remember to be openly smart, OK? No matter what the president says, smart is good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It finally hit me today. I was taking a long walk, from North Cambridge down to Lechmere Square, thinking about nothing in particular, when I realized why I have a visceral dislike of the current president of the United States. It’s not because he’s an evangelical Christian, because I get along quite well with other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}