November 2007

Common Sense

When I was ten, I had two best friends, Debbie and Patsy. Patsy was the fastest runner on my block and the best Double Dutch jumper. Debbie, on the other hand, read adult books, wrote poetry that didn’t rhyme, and did well in school. Thanks to Google, I know that Debbie is now a high-powered professor of political science. I have no idea how Patsy has ended up, but my guess is she’s in something more practical than academia—for while Patsy was intellectually unexceptional, she had common sense.

No one in Debbie’s family, smart as they all were, seemed to have any. Debbie’s mother, who had a doctorate in sociology, was incapable of cooking anything, no matter how simple, without destroying it. For dinner, she routinely served blackened pot roast from which Debbie’s father, a Psychology professor, would carve layers of ash. When Debbie’s mother cooked spaghetti, she let the pasta boil until it disappeared entirely. Debbie’s older brother, who was fifteen, was allowed to operate a working still in his bedroom, and Debbie’s sister always had a leather bag of wine in her room that we used to sample freely, which no one seemed to mind.

Their kitchen always reeked of pickles because at any given time, ten jars of pickled tomatoes stood open with one or two tomatoes left in each one; evidently, it occurred to no one to throw them out. The family dog stank, too, though they bathed her occasionally in Pine-sol. Because no one thought to spay her, she was constantly having torrid affairs with other neighborhood dogs on the front lawn.

On the other hand, Patsy’s numerous siblings were all extremely athletic, except for one bookish one of whom everyone was suspicious. Her brothers played basketball incessantly in the back yard when they were not mowing the lawn, and her sisters were the neighborhood’s best babysitters. Everyone in the family—except the bookish one—was incredibly competent. Patsy, for example, knew how to make Campbell’s tomato soup and cheese sandwiches, and while she applied copious mustard to the latter, a culinary misstep, in my opinion, it was still impressive.

Patsy’s family drank gallons of Coke, watched hours of TV, and listened to loud rock and roll, but this seemed to do them no harm. Debbie’s family did not watch TV, listened to classical music, and as I’ve mentioned, existed entirely on a diet of ashes.

I loved both of these families, each with its own weird charm. It was Debbie’s father who once patiently explained to me what marijuana was. At Patsy’s house, I learned about horse racing. At Debbie’s, I first heard Woody Guthrie; at Patsy’s, I developed an addiction to Dick Tracy. At Debbie’s, I drank coffee and ate pickled tomatoes; at Patsy’s, it was Coke and potato chips. Perhaps my simultaneous best-friendship with both of them, which was useful for Double Dutch but little else, was doomed by its triangular nature to failure, and I eventually lost touch with both of them, but I think back fondly on my simultaneous time with them, confusing though it was.

The recent reemergence of Al Gore in our national discourse has caused me to think back on the Patsy-Debbie dichotomy. I felt, and perhaps you did, too, that as international apologies go, the Nobel Prize didn’t go nearly far enough in making up to Gore what the world owes him. As polar icecaps melt, southern California fries, and we here in Maryland walk around in our summer clothes in October, Gore’s stance on global warming appears vindicated, and it’s hard not to wonder just what else he was right about, or would have been, had he gotten the chance to be president.

But during the 2000 debates, he was characterized by the media as an egomaniacal, delusional blowhard, a “wonk” whose manner of speaking effused condescension for his obvious intellectual inferior. Bush, on the other hand, was depicted as fun, even charming, the kind of guy who, after sharing a friendly beer with you, would come up with a bunch of practical, real-world solutions. Here’s what Bush said when asked what he would do in case of a “financial crisis”:
I would make sure that key members of Congress were called in to discuss the gravity of the situation. And I would come up with a game plan to deal with it. That’s what governors end up doing. We end up being problem solvers. We come up with practical, common sense solutions for problems that we’re confronted with.

Bush presented himself—and the media bought it—as the common sense guy. Gore, on the other hand, would presumably allow terrorists to move into our homes and take over our lives while he was busy pontificating. It was obvious from the debates that Bush was a bit thick-witted and had trouble pronouncing the names of foreign leaders, but the assumption seemed to be that at least he could make a mean cheese sandwich.

But as it turned out, Bush could not make a cheese sandwich; indeed, he could probably not make one if you handed him two pieces of Wonder bread and a slice of Velveeta and told him exactly where to put them. Unlike Patsy’s family, who were, come to think of it, the only Republicans in my neighborhood, Bush has no common sense at all, and can only destroy everything he touches, like King Midas in reverse.

I was musing about this and then the other day, I happened to watch an address Al Gore gave on Martin Luther King Day in 2006. In this long but consistently brilliant speech, Gore makes a number of references to historical subjects, indicating that he is familiar with America’s past, as well as its historical documents, e.g., the Constitution. (In this, he is strikingly unlike Bush, who seems to view such documents as things to be gotten out of his way.) Now that we no longer have Al Gore to kick around, it seems clear that he could have done a far better job of running this country in the past seven years than Bush has—in fact, it seems clear that my nine-year-old niece could have done a better job. Gore’s book larnin’ might have come in handy at this critical juncture in America’s history.

And contrary to the way he was depicted during his presidential campaign, Gore apparently also has plenty of common sense, evidenced by the fact that despite a growing “Draft Gore” movement, he is not running for president. If I were him, I would continue to refuse, even if all the swinish pundits who depicted him “as an Internet-inventing exaggerator who sighed during the debates and needed a consultant to steer him to an earth-toned wardrobe, crawled to him on their hands and knees, begging.

The truth is, intellect and common sense are not mutually exclusive, and education does not destroy one’s ability to function in the real world—in fact, sometimes it can come in handy. As I prepare to finish my doctorate next month, an exercise that seems somewhat pointless at my stage in life, I comfort myself with this. Meanwhile, if Debbie and Patsy should ever happen to run for president (unlikely, since Debbie is now a Canadian), I’d advise you to vote for Debbie.

For more sin click here.

Comments: