Not Always a Nation of Dunces

Here’s a nice coun­ter­point to our post last week cov­er­ing Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of Amer­i­can Unrea­son and her lament that Amer­i­ca has declined into a morass of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism and low expec­ta­tions.

Let’s set the scene: A reporter selects a young Barack Oba­ma sup­port­er at a ral­ly and starts pep­per­ing him with ques­tions about the can­di­date. And it all feels like a staged effort to demon­strate that the mobi­lized youth has no real han­dle on the issues. He’s just blind­ly buy­ing the hype. With­out wast­ing time, the reporter leads the young man into a con­ver­sa­tion on the com­plex­i­ties of health care. It’s the per­fect set­up. But then it sud­den­ly becomes clear that the reporter chose the wrong kid (who is a nat­u­ral­ized immi­grant, by the way) to play the fool. Watch the video below (and check out this fol­low up video that gives you more of the back sto­ry).

via Think on These Things

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