I wanted to see your utopia, but now I see it is more of a Fruitopia

Read this article in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen. I usually read and enjoy Stern's articles. This was no exception. Very perceptive and insightful. He's far more balanced and reasonable in his writings - and far less ideological - than his often peevish colleague David Warren (who I can barely tolerate). Well, that's my own opinion, anyway...

Here it is (please note that anything emphasized in boldface is my own, and not the author's):

Intellectual problems

By: Leonard Stern

Surveying coverage of Stéphane Dion’s ascension, one gets the feeling that some journalists are developing a crush on the new Liberal leader. Mr. Dion, as every news story has announced, or more accurately, celebrated, is an “intellectual.” With a PhD from the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, Mr. Dion is a bona fide member of the cognitive elite. Journalists in the Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa corridor fancy themselves among this elite, too. Finally, a politician who is worthy.
While intellectuals fit in nicely at dinner parties in Westboro and Westmount, they can make for flawed politicians.
1) Sultans of spin: One attribute of intelligence is the ability to manipulate language. It’s a valuable skill, but one often used for nefarious purposes. People with high verbal intelligence – a.k.a. silver-tongued devils – make effective serial killers, demagogues and salespeople. Bill Clinton likely had the highest raw IQ of any recent U.S. president. A Rhodes scholar and former law professor, Mr. Clinton has extraordinary verbal fluency: His mastery of argumentation and persuasion propelled him to the White House. Alas, it also made him the master of spin. He could talk his way out of anything, and he did.
2) The paralysis of analysis: As noted above, those who possess high verbal intelligence are able to spin us in circles. Equally troublesome is the fact that intellectuals are so comfortable with language and ideas that they would rather talk and think than act. The biggest brain at Ottawa City Hall might well belong to Rockcliffe Councillor Jacques Legendre, who has a PhD in physics. Yet Mr. Legendre is known for his tendency to pontificate and expound and analyse and – whoa, I almost fell asleep just thinking about the councillor at the microphone.
Again, recall the Clinton experience. Mr. Clinton ran his administration like a university seminar. His cabinet was stacked with former university professors, just like himself. It was a theoretician’s paradise. Unfortunately, though, nothing much got done. Everyone was still yakking away in the Oval Office when the janitors came in and announced that eight years were up.
3) The Woody Allen factor: At least Bill Clinton had a healthy supply of alpha male testosterone. Other intellectuals, however, are often of the tweedy variety. Michael Dukakis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was so mousy and bookish that he never had a chance against George H.W. Bush during the 1988 U.S. presidential election. After losing by a landslide, Mr. Dukakis retreated to teach political science at university, where he belonged.
It is important for leaders to project not just brain power but emotional and spiritual strength as well, particularly in times of uncertainty such as war or economic recession. The smartest person in the room is not necessarily the one who possesses the ineluctable quality of leadership. Mr. Dion is often described as “owlish,” and the press corps always found it endearing that he carried a knapsack into cabinet meetings. He has doubtless been the smartest guy in the room many times. But if he’s prime minister and Canada is hit by a terrorist attack and our collective nerves need steadying, he’ll need to lose the student book bag.
The best leaders represent the best of both worlds – the soldier-scholars. Winston Churchill was one. Abe Lincoln was a gifted writer with the mind of a philosopher, but he also had a keener understanding of battlefield strategy than did his generals. The current U.S. president is neither soldier nor scholar, and his inadequacies are painfully obvious.
4) The ivory tower syndrome: For all their professed cosmopolitanism, university intellectuals such as Mr. Dion come from a narrow milieu: urban, liberal, secular. A major study released in October found that on American campuses, professors overwhelmingly identify with the political and cultural left. Almost a third of the professors surveyed think the U.S. is a greater threat to international security than is Iran or China. The liberal bias is assuredly even more pronounced at Canadian and European universities.
The problem with urban intellectual elites is that they don’t realize how narrow their world is. In his Borat movie, the brainy comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a graduate of Cambridge University, gleefully portrays Pentecostal Christians as exotic freaks. Someone needs to tell Mr. Cohen that he’s the exotic one. There are fewer millionaire Cambridge University graduates than Pentecostal Christians.
Shortly after winning the Liberal leadership, Mr. Dion began attacking Prime Minister Stephen Harper for his “far-right” agenda. One hopes that Mr. Dion was simply engaging in rhetorical excess, but who knows, maybe he really does move in circles where people think that opposition to same-sex marriage or to the gun registry automatically makes you a right-wing whacko.
If Mr. Dion wants to become prime minister, he’ll have to show he can relate even to people who have never been members of a faculty club.

Basically, I think Mr. Stern is right on. He clearly elucidates the the ugly downside of modern (or, perhaps, post-modern) intellectualism. As a "small-l" liberal myself (albeit a moderate one), what I see as liberal dogmatism and insularity bothers me just as much as conservative dogmatism and insularity, if not more so. That's the beauty of being centrist like me - you can more easily recognize both the merits and the flaws of either side of the political spectrum. So many of my left-leaning friends rail against the iniquities and misrepresentations brought about by powerful right-wing groups in America (think Fox News, for example), yet are completely oblivious to the excesses of their own bias.

They fail to realize, or just actively ignore, the fact that leftists can distort, propagandize and misrepresent information & the truth just as well as their counterparts on the right. Soviet communism - most especially under Stalin - proved that beyond the shadow of a doubt. Indeed, history shows that governments of the far-left and the far-right amount to the same thing in the end: brutal dictatorship of the worst kind. In my opinion, there was very little fundamental difference between the likes of Hitler and Stalin; they were just two sides of the same coin. Similarly, the public face/voice they used were equally false and absurd; Pravda and Völkischer Beobachter were one in the same. I know I'm using a rather extreme example here, but I trust my point is clear...

In one of my very first posts on this blog, I denounced the growing, insidious trend of anti-intellectualism in our society. I stand by what I said then; I believe it still. Anti-intellectualism continues to run rampant in popular culture. If the likes of Paris Hilton and Joey Tribbiani are any indication, they are encouraging us to focus more on cosmetic surgery & shopping than on Chopin and Schopenhauer. [Pretty nifty alliteration there, eh? ;-)] We should be pretty and thin, often at the expense of being smart. Civilization is in deeper trouble than I thought if we persist in glorifying such ludicrous vacuousness and asinine superficiality..

Now, that being said, I found the above article a refreshing reminder of how there is such a thing as being too intellectual. While I still abhor anti-intellectualism, I'm humble enough to realize that being an intellectual (something to which I myself aspire) does indeed have its pitfalls and drawbacks. As Stern points out, being too pensive and over-analytical can often lead to navel-gazing indecisiveness - not a good quality in any kind of leader. It can also needlessly complicate things. Freud himself said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...

I'll leave you now with an Apache proverb:

It is better to have less thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand.