The first Shakespeare play I read was Julius Caesar in sophomore year of high school. I still recall Caesar's line: "Let me have men around me who are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep a nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous."
Despite our founding out of the Enlightenment--with all that came with in terms of the basis of our Constitution--we've always had an anti-intellectual streak coursing through our veins. From Andrew Jackson through the westward push and frontier-erasing, it's been there.
Even as we founded land-grant universities, heralded inventions and celebrated our literary artists, it's been there. It's always been there. And it's never leaving.
As Susan Sarandon aptly said in Bull Durham, "The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self awareness." That's truer now than when Ron Shelton wrote it in 1987.
Very true. And one thing that I've always said separates us from Canada. They tend to keep their anti-intellectual wingnuts isolated on the prairies. Here, we give ours the keys to the Ferrari and watch as they wrap it around a tree.
Fear of thought is why we are in our current perilous place.
The first Shakespeare play I read was Julius Caesar in sophomore year of high school. I still recall Caesar's line: "Let me have men around me who are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep a nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous."
Despite our founding out of the Enlightenment--with all that came with in terms of the basis of our Constitution--we've always had an anti-intellectual streak coursing through our veins. From Andrew Jackson through the westward push and frontier-erasing, it's been there.
Even as we founded land-grant universities, heralded inventions and celebrated our literary artists, it's been there. It's always been there. And it's never leaving.
As Susan Sarandon aptly said in Bull Durham, "The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self awareness." That's truer now than when Ron Shelton wrote it in 1987.
I hear you, but we never willingly gave those people the keys to the family car after they totaled the previous one.
Very true. And one thing that I've always said separates us from Canada. They tend to keep their anti-intellectual wingnuts isolated on the prairies. Here, we give ours the keys to the Ferrari and watch as they wrap it around a tree.