"THE RELEVANCE OF INTELLIGENCE" is a phrase from former journalist/political attack dog Sidney Blumenthal's just-published memoir of the Clinton administration, in which he writes that the ex-president was usually the smartest guy in the room, knowing more about any particular policy than the policy experts themselves.
Reading that phrase in a book review the other day reminded me (for reasons you'll soon understand) of a car accident my wife and daughter were lucky to walk away from three years ago. A 16-year-old driving a new Lincoln coupe hit them at 70 mph--twice the speed limit--after careening off a hillside. Later that night the kid's mother told me how shocked she was by the witness reports of his reckless driving. "But he got 1550 on his SAT," she cried.
"What do you do for a living?" I asked.
It was no surprise to hear that she's a college professor.
Like millions of intellectual elites and wannabes, this woman presumes an inherent connection between intelligence and goodness, and between intelligence and wisdom, as though there exists some objective domain of ethicality to which Mensa members are automatically admitted.
The presumption is of course wrong--demonstrably so--but it does begin to explain why so many academics and pundits and other affiliates of the intelligentsia ridicule George W. Bush's purported lack of gray matter. That he doesn't see the truths they consider self-evident means he must be stupid; and because he is, he can be neither good nor wise--as his policies confirm. In this tautology, the man's staircase ends three steps shy of the second floor.
Googling "Bush" and "stupid" yields about 90,000 hits, the first several hundred of which (I got bored and stopped clicking) are the usual jokes and articles about the president's challenged cranium. Among them you'll see Photoshop composites of him in a dunce cap and as Alfred E. Neumann; a prominent columnist's observation that he suffers from "bovine incomprehension"; an article titled "Is Bush Just Too Stupid For Words?"; and several parody song lyrics like "Stupid Bush has to lie" (sung to the tune of "Cupid").
You may also stumble across Cher's opinion that Bush is "stupid" and "lazy"; actor David Clennon's explanation for why the president is no Hitler: "Because George Bush . . . is not as smart as Adolf Hitler"; Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins's verdict that "Bush isn't quite as stupid as he sounds, and heaven knows he can't be as stupid as he looks"; and Fidel Castro's stated hope that the president not be "as stupid as he seems."
Not surprisingly, many of the same millions who call Bush dumb consider Bill Clinton the White House's most brilliant occupant. Googling "Clinton" and "stupid" (for an apples-to-apples comparison) generates mostly variations on the 1992 campaign's signature slogan, "It's the economy, stupid"--nuggets like "It's the education, stupid" and "It's the lying, stupid." No one, or at least no one in the first several hundred hits, regards the impeached president as thick.
Indeed, the zeitgeist was not surprised when the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania, led by Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein and Professor Patricia F. Dilliams, released its study ranking the IQs of every president over the last 50 years and found that first among them, with a 182, was Bill Clinton. He was followed, in order, by Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Franklin Roosevelt (so much for 50 years).
As for the dumbest chief executives, they were, in descending order, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and--brace yourself--his son, the current president, whose 91 charts in at exactly half of Clinton's.
The results were so alarming--ohmygod, our president is a complete doofus!--they were forwarded via e-mail tens of millions of times, from one concerned citizen to another, and impelled Garry Trudeau to compose a Doonesbury strip around Bush's low "intelligence quota."
Just one problem. There is no Lovenstein Institute, no Dr. Lovenstein, no Professor Dilliams. That the Internet ruse spread so quickly, without anyone bothering to immediately verify the results (it was "a fact too good to check," as they say at the New York Times), frankly explains more about our culture than it does about our president.
