I had the opportunity to talk in a conference call with Al Gore earlier today. The impetus for the call was climate change. And much to his chagrin, probably, I'm not going to mention anything he said. Well, not at the moment, anyway.
I asked my question -- probably a petty and trivial one, no doubt, about where on the spectrum he believes the American people as a whole to now be at, in terms of knowledge and action -- and he answered, and at length, an answer that took perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, constructed not just in words but paragraph by paragraph, concept by concept, answering the question by constructing the framework for the question and then building it in pieces, one at a time, until he arrived at the endpoint he intended with the bits and pieces that were required to support it.
Ah, what might have been. Gore was widely derided by the press for the audacity of the lengthy answer or the wonkish explanation, a man too versed in facts, or God forbid with a speaking style that paused, from time to time, to find the right phrase instead of the next phrase. Not a man you would want to have a beer with, was the conventional wisdom shoved down our gullets like we were geese being prepped for our final hours. Knowledge is wooden, education is wooden, intellectualism is wooden, because facts are like trees: there's too damn many of them, and they're hard to tell apart.
With all due respect to the national media: you sorry, hollow, pretentious jackasses. What I would not give for a President that could speak in complete sentences; that was able to write with clarity, and read from time to time; that could come around the back of an issue and pull the curtain away for a better look, even if only every once in a great while. What would we ever do with some of the giants of our past, figures who, back in the days before speechwriters, could turn conversations on a dime with the power of their own arguments, when now a few turns of phrase churned out from a Peggy Noonan wannabe and presented via teleprompter before a repetitive moron-proof backdrop is considered the only soluble standard of leadership. God help us, our pundits are idiots.
Honestly. Yet another mark of an ongoing era that I will never forgive, and never forget. The elevation by the supposed masters of our discourse of vapid, boozy barroom conversation as the mark of national leadership. Anti-intellectualism embraced now for perhaps twenty five years by pundits that pretend mightily at being erudite, but can only manage it in the confines of their own swelled heads and whose eyes gloss over like those of dolls if a conversation makes it beyond the first few words they can scribble down.
Dear pundit class: bite me, and I mean that sincerely. Dear Al Gore: whether you ever run again or not is up to you. But I'm glad to know you, even if only for a ten minute stretch, and I'd give my eyeteeth to have a beer with you.
And that's about all I have to say, for now, about that.
