Renaissance Weekend, Charleston, SC. President Clinton's reading habits and intellectual curiosity set him apart.Isn't it time we start demanding the leaders we need and not ones we seem destined to deserve?
Intellectual curiosity and a passion for reading are central to effective leadership. Why then do we continue to put people in leadership positions who celebrate anti-intellectualism and revel in an unwillingness to read?
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," President Bush said recently. Excuse me? Many thousands of us knew the risks posed by the levees from the Times Picayune and other sources. Check out the October 2001 issue of Scientific America, coming at the very moment of 9/11 entitled "Drowning New Orleans" foreshadowed current events. Here's the blurb: "This 10-page feature article by S.A. contributing editor Mark Fischetti describes the causes of the ever-increasing vulnerability of New Orleans to a major hurricane. The article summary in the Table of Contents reads as follows, "A major hurricane could swamp the city under 20 feet of water, killing thousands."
Say what you will about President Clinton, but his voracious intellectual curiosity is essential for effective leadership. Otherwise, we have people in office merely play-acting as leaders with consequences that can be damaging in the extreme. President Bush likes to play the anti-intellectual "good old boy." He really loved saying, "I don't do nuance." Without nuance, however, the world is reduced to simplistic comic-book notions of good and evil. The Middle East might as well be called the "Middle Nuance" and the President's startling ignorance of that region's history has plunged us into an abyss from which we will not recover in my lifetime. Without the firm rudder of historical knowledge, he gave Wolfowitz, Cheney, Feith, Bill Kristol and the increasingly discredited neo-cons the opportunity to pursue a foreign policy that is a tragic utopian vision disproved by history and framed in sports metaphors.