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sponsorship
Rachael, I don't guess I know that many people who think of themselves as intellectuals—or would say so out loud, at any rate, no matter how much they love kicking around ideas. (My mom described me that way once, in anger, and it was soooo not a compliment. "Who died and made you Lionel Trilling, missy?'' was the drift, and doubtless with good reason.)
I did work for an intellectual at one point—and I know this because he spoke of it constantly; in fact, he talked so much about his own heapin' helpin' of smarts that one wondered, as he would have said, how wide-ranging his great thoughts really were.
Public intellectuals in recent political life? Obama would be the first in the White House since ... Woodrow Wilson? (Or can a rip-roaring racist ever qualify as such?) Otherwise, we've had Pat Moynihan, by any standard, Al Gore, as a great prophet and popularizer of science and technology he was quick to grasp the significance of, Bill Bradley in his own mind, thanks to John McPhee, and uh ... not Bill Clinton, though he is definitely 10 kinds of smart. I guess no Republicans spring to mind because they've been running against the Ivory Tower crowd for as long as I can remember.
What does it even mean to be living the life of the mind in this moment of the body/age of the Internet/time of the more, faster, ruder, and right now? I had a French boyfriend—yes, this was after the war—who defined an intellectual as anyone compelled to "passer des nuits blanches'' for the sheer pleasure of it, in the grip of a book. But to then brag about it? Pas sexy, even in France. And in this country, our challenge seems to be to find that middle ground—your favorite spot, Rachael—between pride in mediocrity and pointless showing off. Aspiring to know more should be a given and shared goal rather than, as you say, just another way to divide us into haves and (ha-ha, you down there) have-nots.