The end of ignorance?

With one week remaining in the Bush presidency, the time has come for a look back at the administration's many failings. But lost amid all the talk of 9-11, the response to Katrina, the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, our crumbling infrastructure, etc., is the faux cowboy's greatest achievement -- the triumph of anti-intellectualism. Or, to put it in terms he'd probably prefer, the dumb guys won.

Simply put, in the Bush years, being smart was no longer a good thing. If you went to a good college -- or any college -- you were branded "elitist." God help you if you were a patron of the arts ... you elitist creep. If you believed in global warming or evolution or if you drove one of those sissified hybrid ve-hicles ... that's right ... elitist!

So it thrills me to no end to see the walking, talking embodiment of this attitude ambling his way out of the White House. But of course, this doesn't mean the end of the line for the Know-Nothing crowd, so it never hurts to remain vigilant.

Which brings me to Population 485 by Michael Perry. He's a pretty intriguing guy who straddles both worlds -- a writer who also owns a rusty pickup and fights fires as a hobby. Yesterday, I reached a passage in the book that just floored me, the best summary of the brain wars I've read to this date. He'd just attended a lecture by noted feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum and he was contemplating the intellectual divide on the drive back to his small-town oasis of New Auburn, Wisc. He writes:

Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the cafe. But anyone who sits in that cafe and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious. Civilization itself depends on complication. As a dyed-in-the-slop farm boy, I find I have an almost atavistic urge to poor-mouth anyting more theoretical than a bag of feed. I have come to realize this is not always attractive.

For the last eight years, this country has been run by the kind of people who booed the principal at every school assembly. Now, under President Obama, this country has a chance to bounce back. Let's declare a War on Ignorance. Actually, let's not -- you can't eliminate ignorance, just as you can't eliminate terror, although if we'd had a president who was less ignorant, most of the country would have figured that out by now.