All Brains

This Postie, railing against 'anti-intellectualism' in America, actually opens the piece with a quote form Emerson. I am vaguely aware of who this Emerson fellow was, a writer, pre-Civil War. Anyway, our intrepid author says:

 It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. 

Yes.

The Postie goes on to note:

 I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. 

The author establishes her credentials as a pointy-head and spends the article complaining about television, the internet, blah, blah blah. Remember, when she was 13 she read books in tree houses.

For most of us 'folks' as she would complain, intellectualism conjures images of pointy-headed, know-it-alls sitting around a cafe, sipping wine and pondering Jean Paul Sartre. This author was in a production of a Sarte play, yikes.

Perhaps going through the record could clear this up.

Karl Marx: intellectual. Thought up communism. 100 million dead in 20th century.

Abraham Lincoln: Not an intellectual. Won the Civil War. Thought up the Emancipation Proclamation and the Homestead Act.

Franklin Roosevelt: Not an intellectual. Won World War II. Thought up the New Deal.

So yes, yes indeed.