Too Many Faux Intellectualists

This is the faux intellectualism we are faced with today in America.

People who in trying to APPEAR intelligent, who wish to believe in their superiority, in their conflated intelligence, who may indeed seem and in general may even be smart people, still do not have the depth of mind, experience (or energy apparently) to see (or look) into a situation and NOT say:

"Well let's hear the other side of this, we don't know the other side."

Sounds typically reasonable, right? Well, not always to be sure.

Sometimes that statement merely points out how ignorant if not outright stupid we can be. I've certainly known people like that. In point of fact, we now even have a president who is the ultimate purveyor of such nonsense (one might even suspect "Nonsense" could be his middle name).

Everyone wants to think they are brilliant and yet at times, when no one is watching, you can see them if not metaphorically then physically walk themselves into a door frame. Apparently they are fully unable to hit the space between the doorway's borders. More often metaphorically, if you watch and listen carefully. Though many times anymore, not even carefully.

Some make these repeated faux pas simply because, though they may have booksmarts, they certainly seem to lack any sense of streetsmarts. There is simply no depth to them, no natural or learned sense of reality. At times even in the most simple of things and situations. And their followers, follow along, as if mesmerized by a pied piper of political absurdities.

In 1982 Billy Wilder on the Dick Cavett show spoke of two interesting things. More only two, but two that I'm mentioning here. One was how a friend of his went to see the play, The Diary of Anne Frank with a younger American friend.

Afterward the man said to this younger friend, "Can you imagine such things can happen?" To which his friend replied exactly and as I mentioned above, "Well let's hear the other side of this, we don't know the other side." Seriously? How uneducated or unintelligent does one have to be to make such a statement?

We have been hearing this same exact mindset from our American (supremacist?) right so much anymore and so sadly about white supremacists, right wing bigots and racists, and about authoritarianism and authoritarians, about Donald Trump, his family his klan.

The other thing was Wilder being asked how Jews in Berlin could possibly have stayed when they actually saw for themselves what the Nazis were doing to their friends and neighbors in dragging them away. Was it because they believed it couldn't happen there in the country of such great thought and giants of human culture?

And yet, it did. Could it now happen elsewhere too? Could it?

It is a sobering thing to consider. For we are there, now.


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