Moving Beyond Smart

By John Powers, LA Weekly. Posted January 23, 2003.

Near the end of the Reagan era, I once found myself at a cocktail party talking with Norman Mailer, who couldn't stop talking about his dislike of yuppie culture. "Do you know the worst thing about it?" he asked, rattling off words like a Brooklyn bookie. "It places its highest value on astuteness."

Now, Mailer himself was never exactly what you'd call a sucker. By the early 1950s, he'd grasped that, in a society dominated by mass media, literary fame was less a matter of writing great books (though that did help) than making oneself a public personality. With no little canniness, he began creating advertisements for himself a full 40 years before Dave Eggers -- with a wink displaying his own commercial acumen -- declared his own staggering genius.

Still, over the years, I've come to think that Mailer got it pretty much right. If the '60s and early '70s were shot through with a sentimental, often dopey idealism, the last two decades have put a premium on a particular, and extremely narrow, idea of being smart -- wised-up, pragmatic, detached.

Our culture has made a fetish of knowingness: which tech stock is hot, which designer is about to break out, which movie is number one at the box office, which cable show is being spoofed on Saturday Night Live, which Internet site sells the cheapest everything. The flip side of all this knowing has been a loss of courage, a terror of appearing foolish if we champion lost causes, hang out at yesterday's hot club or (god help us) admit to tearing up at the uncle's death in Spider-Man. At times, it seems that American life -- or at least that part of it portrayed in the media -- has become a ghastly version of high school in which everyone is supposed to be one of the cool kids. Small wonder that the era's key signature has been a free-floating irony that allows almost anyone to be in on the joke, while remaining outside and beyond everything else.

For years, such cultivated knowingness felt inescapable. It was there in Seinfeld's smug dithering, David Letterman's pre-heart surgery cruelty to ordinary people and the Coen Brothers' snickers at almost everything. It inhabited Jeff Koons' meta-kitsch sculptures and Jenny Holtzer's desiccated truisms (no less banal for adorning museum walls). It stared out from Vanity Fair covers, desperate to be the first to announce the impending superstardom of Gretchen Mol (oops!), and from ESPN's wiseass anchors who clearly think their quips are more enjoyable than anything a mere athlete might do. It even prompted the vogue of Don DeLillo, whose dazzling-cold sentences have a disco-ball brilliance -- all those memorable riffs on car crashes, football, Hitler -- yet can't make you care what happens to a single one of his characters.

This worship of "smart" has had its analogue in the political world, most damagingly among liberals and leftists, who have long been drawn to elitist intellectual style (think Adlai Stevenson). They spent eight years calling Reagan "stupid" -- as he steamrolled them -- and, evidently learning nothing from the experience, have continued doing the same with George W. Bush, who skillfully masks his actual elitism with an affably folksy persona that is a construction (as we discover in "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush," the new book by his ex-speechwriter, David Frum). People laughed at Bush's malaprops as he snatched the presidency from A-student Al Gore, and you still hear them calling him "dumb" as he completes a far more successful first two years than the promiscuously intelligent Bill Clinton.

Watching today's bloodless, pragmatic Democrats' feeble attempts to confront Bush always reminds me of CNN's original Crossfire back when raging bull Pat Buchanan was paired with sly, bespectacled Michael Kinsley. Buchanan would spout some conservative boilerplate aimed straight at the listener's gut, then Kinsley would make a wry, twinkly, debating-society response that may have had some imaginary Oxford audience shouting "Here, here," but got him flattened in the rough-and-tumble of a TV talk show. You always wound up knowing what Buchanan thought about every subject, while wondering what exactly Kinsley believed in -- other than his own ability to make smart arguments. Caught behind his frozen grin, he seemed unaware that knowing isn't everything.

Nor, for that matter, is knowingness. Well before 9/11 supposedly rang the death knell of irony (thank god Larry David slept through it), there were countless signs that the Age of Smart had begun to crumble from its own brittleness. Letterman was waxing positively avuncular, Eminem was exploding pomo playfulness with roaring emotion, and self-important Jonathan Franzen was stripping away some of his highfalutin intellectual armature to write his pointedly touching family novel The Corrections (although he did get all snooty about Oprah).

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