The dumbest Americans: "those born from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s."

WaPo reports:

Compared with every other birth cohort, they have performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the fewest educational degrees and been the least attracted to professional careers....

Early Xers are the least bookish CEOs and legislators the United States has seen in a long while. They prefer sound bites over seminars, video clips over articles, street smarts over lofty diplomas. They are impatient with syntax and punctuation and citations -- and all the other brainy stuff they were never taught.

Is that dumb or a different way of being smart?

IN THE COMMENTS: Jeff with one 'f' said...

Talk about moving the goalposts. The last I heard the Baby Boom was defined as those born between 1946 and 1964. Now this clown wants to cut the generation in half to make the Xers look bad? Please.

We talked about that back here when the subject was whether Barack Obama, born in 1961, counted as a Boomer. [DATE CORRECTED.] I say he is not. To be a Boomer, you need to have grown up in the post-war afterglow, when parents and communities were psyched about living a normal, conventional family life. You have to have seen what the world was like before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Kennedy Assassination, before Vietnam. If you experienced the Beatles when you were a teenager, you're a Boomer. If you had disco, you're not.

AND: Palladian said...

"Is that dumb or a different way of being smart?"

It's called the influence of the Sixties, man! Even though the Boomers caused the Sixties, they were lucky enough to have had a pre-Sixties education and exposure to pre-Sixties culture. Not so for the poor younger folks, whose brains were permanently damaged by firsthand exposure to the catastrophe of the Age of Aquarius.

I too suspect that the dumbness attributed to the X-ers was produced by the culture of the previous 2 generations. It's not just the Boomers. We were sucking up that culture and promoting it, imbuing it with the power of the young, but people like John Lennon and Bob Dylan were not themselves Boomers. They were born in 1940 and 1941, respectively. Timothy Leary was born in 1920. Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926. Abbie Hoffman was born in 1936.

What am I trying to say? We didn't start the fire.

"Obama talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters."

That's Obama -- talking about himself in the third person to characterize the way "the press" "interpreted" his statement that people in small, jobless towns "get bitter" and "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

He offers the true interpretation:

And I was actually making the reverse point, clumsily, which is that these voters have a right to be frustrated because they’ve been ignored. And because Democrats haven’t met them halfway on cultural issues, we’ve not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition.

Though he now calls his bitter clingers line "my biggest boneheaded move," I'll bet he thinks he has a right to be frustrated that his attempts to communicate to them effectively have not been fully appreciated.

“I mean, part of what I was trying to say to that group in San Francisco was, ‘You guys need to stop thinking that issues like religion or guns are somehow wrong,’ ” he continued. “Because, in fact, if you’ve grown up and your dad went out and took you hunting, and that is part of your self-identity and provides you a sense of continuity and stability that is unavailable in your economic life, then that’s going to be pretty important, and rightfully so. And if you’re watching your community lose population and collapse but your church is still strong and the life of the community is centered around that, well then, you know, we’d better be paying attention to that.”

Don't you want the President to be an intellectual? In Obama's world, people hunt for a sense of continuity and stability. By contrast, Sarah Palin hunts to stock the freezer with meat.

IN THE COMMENTS: Darcy said:

Why does he assume (really..he does!) liking to hunt or own guns has anything to do with "a sense of continuity and stability" that isn't in an individual's economic life? And going to church have anything to do with your community losing population and collapsing?

Why don't these people just lean on the Democrats tofulfill these needs, hmm? I mean, really!

He had a second bite at the apple, and yet still revealed the same offensive thoughts.

Palladian said:

The wonderful thing about Obama is that, even though he's slick and polished, in the end he can't seem to stop himself from eventually saying what he really believes, from the bitter clinging remark to the Joe The Plumber wealth redistribution thing.

Jeff with one 'f' said...

Isn't "Change" the direct opposite of "a sense of continuity and stability"?

Pogo feels moved to quote George Orwell:

"Only an intellectual could say something so stupid."

"Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

Doyle said:

He should have just said "Who knew hicks were so sensitive?"

AND: At the end of a long day, I'm amused by Darcy's tiny typo "tofulfill." It's like a landfill, but for tofu. Also, there's this from Tom Macguire, making some good points but also accusing me of being abnormally un-laserlike. I remember when the lefties were the ones who thought I was thick.