On Pretension

Sometimes, we need a little snobbery.

There's an episode of The West Wing that I keep thinking back to as I watch today's political landscape and wonder how we got here. In Hartsfield's Landing, Toby and President Bartlet have this exchange:

Toby Ziegler: You’re a good father, you don’t have to act like it. You’re the President, you don’t have to act like it. You’re a good man, you don’t have to act like it. You’re not just folks, you’re not plain-spoken... Do not – do not – do not act like it!
President Bartlet: I don’t want to be killed.
Toby Ziegler: Then make this election about smart, and not... Make it about engaged, and not. Qualified, and not. Make it about a heavyweight. You’re a heavyweight. And you’ve been holding me up for too many rounds.

Toby is desperately urging the President to be himself during this election season, since the President has been so worried about seeming "too smart" to the American electorate. To combat this, the President has been acting plainspoken and, generally, not making people privy to his ingrained roots as a Nobel prize-winning economist and tenured professor. In the process, he's made himself look more and more like Robert Ritchie, the Republican nominee, whose general lack of intelligence is something that Toby hates. The last thing that Toby wants is for President Bartlet to turn into Rob Ritchie. So, as he says, the President should make it about "smart, and not... engaged, and not. Qualified, and not."

President Obama, in real life, has a lot of similarities to The West Wing's awe-inspiring but still very fictional President Bartlet. He's a lawyer who graduated from Columbia for his undergrad and got his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law, before going on to become a senator for Illinois. He was doubtlessly qualified for the job of President of the United States, and this is without mentioning his equally-intelligent wife Michelle who attended Harvard with him. Obama was, unequivocally, an extremely intelligent person.

And yet none of that mattered to the Republican base. Now the last thing I want is to demonize a whole sector of America, but let's not pretend like conservatives were being reasonable with their criticisms of Obama, a person with many faults but whose actual shortcomings are rarely ever aired out loud. Instead of being critical of drone strikes, civilian casualties, failure to balance the budget - instead you got ridiculous rhetoric regarding whether he was actually born in the United States, whether he was secretly a Muslim and founded ISIS, or whatever nonsense that was spewed from the right. The sort of character assassinations thrown at Obama had precious little to do with him, and all to do with intelligence. See, they saw Obama as everything they despised: liberal, coastal, elite, and superior.

I find myself looking through a lot of Obama's earlier work, especially the humorous anecdotes that one accrues over the course of a college career. While in law school, Obama wrote a self-parody in the "Harvard Law Revue" lampooning and making fun of himself. In it, you can get a real sense of the kind of person that Obama is. Funny, smart, well-read - and very much not afraid of self-deprecation. Everything from the overly serious tone that the paper strikes to the excessive footnoting of nonexistent books to the endless allusions of English literature - it reflects of a man who is incredibly intelligent, not to mention a good person. And that's why it's so disheartening to see someone like Donald Trump become President, especially following a man like Obama. He is thin-skinned, cowardly, a puppet, dumb (and not in a George Bush, Yale grad, way), and supported by zealots who would swear up and down the aisle that he's infinitely better than that "socialist Muslim" that had been in power for eight years. It's saddening.

I remember going to my Creative Writing professor while I was writing an essay, worried that I might come off as pretentious. She just looked at me, shook her head, smiled, and said, "Don't worry about it." Because what we think of as pretentious isn't actually pretentious most of the time. We're afraid of seeming "too smart," much in the same way that Bartlet was afraid of seeming "too smart" to his constituents. Somehow, anti-intellectualism has become something of a cult in America, where being dumb and an ideologue rules the day. It's shameful. Intelligence is something to be celebrated and cherished; we don't look down on baseball players for being good at baseball, after all. People, for some reason, don't want to see someone smarter than them in office. This has always perplexed me. I would hope that the President of the United States is smarter than I am, because I'm not all that smart of a person.

Just because the man's smart doesn't mean he's pretentious. And what's so wrong with that, anyway?