A lot of controversy, some anger and what's become the all-too-usual hyperbole and invective have accompanied recent decisions from the Obama administration. But beneath the often deceptive headlines there's something we're maybe not used to: intelligence. Maybe the decision is wrong, but it was arrived at with reasons and with a logical process that includes many sources of information and debate. In a new interview in Newsweek, President Obama describes the step-by-step process he undertook in making decisions on important matters like Afghanistan. And he says:
But one of the things I've actually been encouraged by—and I learned during the campaign—was the American people, I think, not only have a toleration but also a hunger for explanation and complexity, and a willingness to acknowledge hard problems. I think one of the biggest mistakes that is made in Washington is this notion you have to dumb things down for the public. I've always been struck by the fact that, if you can get me in a room with a group of people, even who disagree with me violently on an issue, they'll still take the time to listen. They might not, at the end of it, agree with me, but having seen how I'm thinking about a problem, having a sense of how I'm making decisions, that I understand their point of view, that I can actually make their argument for them, and that that's part of the decision-making process, it gives them a sense, at least, that they've been heard, and I think clarifies—well, it pushes us away from the dogmas and caricatures that I think get in the way of good policymaking and a more civil tone in our politics."
Later in the interview he mentions that he's just screened the new Star Trek movie in the White House, after people kept telling him he's Spock--and then he flashed the Vulcan greeting. He says he was a Star Trek fan from the age of 10.
The Star Trek connection and Spock both make sense. Spock was a symbol of intelligence--of what he called logic--when American policy in the late 60s was crazy, defying sense and logic. By the 80s it was even worse: the complete rule of the cynical and deluded selling patently stupid self-destructive policies to a hapless public glorying in a consumption based on dumbness. I keep thinking of a title of a book of essays about the 80s by Martin Amis--it was called The Moronic Inferno, and that's still the best description of the 80s, when our current disasters were born, brought to maturity by Cheney and the Bushites.
Spock stood for intelligence, which to him meant ethics as well: because they were logical. Gene Roddenberry said that Star Trek's popularity proved that ordinary people were ready for that kind of future, and that they were "light years ahead of their petty governments and visionless leaders."
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