I'll Take the Weird Guy Please

In this morning’s New York Times, David Brooks, attacks and attempts to discredit Al Gore (again). Brooks:” “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.” As if this were a bad thing. Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, were exceedingly strange, and look at their legacy

To my mind we want visionaries as our leaders. People who can peer 20 years into the future and see that funding something like a distributed, node based, computer network, might have some value in the future. Thinkers who understand that carbon emissions might be a looming problem, long before the mass media accept this idea. Weird people, who see how mass advertising and mass psychology erode the underlying principals of our culture and democracy make the best people to make decisions about our collective lives.

People like that, are willing to make decisions based upon the future and the greater good. They make decisions and promote policies based upon what is right, not what is best for the short term interests of economic elites. I am sorry, but given the choice between a guy who might be great to go to a ball game with, a fun, rich, frat boy, who, while charming, and likable, does not have a clue, and a socially inept, weird, visionary, who thinks about the future in profound ways. I will take the weirdo. But I am just a tin foil hat wearing nut. A weirdo myself.

Of course you realize, Al Gore, scares the bejesus out of the status quo. The main stream media hate him because he brings up real issues and makes them look bad. He threatens the current order of things. He has had a peek inside the machine and knows how it really works. He wants to not only change course but change how the machine works as well. Al Gore is a dangerous man.

Brooks, shrill of the conservative elites that he is, gives us an insight as to what a campaign against Gore, in ’08 might look like. Brooks wants us to believe that we should choose our leaders as we often do in grade school, or social organizations. Not based upon their competency, or vision, but based upon their social skills, and popularity based upon personality. This only plays into the hand of the economic elites and results in more of the same lousy policies we have had for the last 25 years.