[QUOTE=cfg83;134752]TeeVee has indeed made it worse, but this is not a recent phenomenon in American culture:"
I don't really agree, but I'm using a rather different sense of the word intellectual than I think Hofstadter does. (I vaguely recall reading that piece...). If you think about the times prior to WWII, you had the practical inventor/scientist as hero: Edison, Bell, the Wright brothers and more in real life; Tom Swift and imitations, endless pulp science fiction stories, etc. Even in the years up to about the end of the '50s, you had Heinlein &c, kids building their own hot rods and so forth. These may not have been intellectual in the academic sense, but neither were they exalting dumbness :-)
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It's too simplistic to say that a rocket scientist is better suited to run the country.
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But I don't think that's what I said. I said the current President, contrary to what his fans would have us believe, ain't no rocket scientist :-) Nor do think that the country needs a rocket scientist in that office, just that its current holder isn't one.