CSotD: On Beyond Genius
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I don't know how fresh Will Rogers's act really was even back in his day, but knee-jerk attacks on Congress and professions of how "they're all crooks" have certainly become tiresome and dime-a-dozen since.
It is not a sign of genius to discover that there are no flawless people in public life and that no system can be designed that does not, at some point, fail.
Moreover, it is the mark of a somewhat-bright 16-year-old to divide the world into "entirely wrong" and "entirely right." Or the mark of a not-terribly-bright 30-year-old.
Jen Sorensen is both terribly bright and somewhat over 30, and the above analysis of the current election is both spot-on and a welcome, welcome relief from the alternatives: Old School cartoonists channeling Will Rogers, and young geniuses looking around for a candidate with absolutely no flaws or shortcomings.
Look at it this way: If I hand you two glasses of red wine to taste, one from a $12 bottle and one from a $30 bottle, I'm not asking you if either of them is the finest wine ever made. I know neither of them is flawless.
And if you think there's no difference between them, if the only way you can differentiate wine is if one costs $250 and the other is Two-Buck-Chuck, then, dude, you're not a genius.
And please, please don't tell me you're too sophisticated to drink the $30 wine. Trust me, it's a bigger insult to your intelligence than to mine. I'm not asking you what I should serve at a state banquet. I'm wondering which I should have with a baguette and a hunk of cheese.
Similarly, politics is not some abstract philosophical search for truth. It's simply a means of governing the world we share and if your name is Julius II, then you go right ahead and hire Michelangelo to decorate your ceiling, but the rest of us are just gonna grab some white paint and a long-handled roller.
And, while Sorensen lays out an intelligent, well-reasoned argument to remind you that, no, they aren't both the same, Derf Backderf puts things on an even more pragmatic level.
Yes. Sometimes an election comes down, not to picking the one you are for, but to picking the one you are against.
And if you're not smart enough to figure that out, you're no genius.
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