Haughty?

Michael Gerson has annoyed the Matron.

Here's his Washington Post headline: The label will stick: Obama is haughty.

If you're in a foul mood and want someone to swear at, go ahead and read. For the rest, the main points that most engaged the Matron were these.

After positioning Obama as an intellectual, Gerson proclaims that "The arrogance of the aristrocrat is nothing compared to the arrogance of the academic."

Dr. Professor Matron takes umbrage! First, she will be the first to admit that P.H.D occasionally means Putty Head Dumb. Just ask her to add double-digit numbers. Second, she will point out the anti-intellectual impulse of her American people. Those who can't do, teach. In some circles, there's nothing more laughable than the wizened, puddling, pooling college professor, lost in his or her own blather.

This anti-intellectualism finds its roots, she thinks, in American egalitarianism, which is fundamentally a good thing, a fine ideal. Equality? Why, the Matron believes she's fought for that concept her entire adult life, in different directions. But not all brains are created equal.

Neither are all bodies. But Michael Jordan made millions for what his body can do. He's Role Model and cultural icon. Brain wattage? Not quite the same currency, cultural or otherwise.

Gerson proves the Matron's point when he says: "It is now possible to imagine Obama at a cocktail party with Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis, sharing a laugh about gun-toting, Bible-thumping, flag-pin-wearing, small-town Americans."

He also claims that Obama's way of analyzing and explaining "always places the explainer in a position of superiority."

The Matron wants to take Bubba out of the picture. She is not talking about some stereotypical trailer park resident, slugging Miller Lite and tuning into Fox. Let's talk about her lovely middle-class husband. He's the smart, capable average Joe, running a successful business. His collar is white. He is very good with numbers and can carry two children at once, in a pinch (although he has yet to build a fence that can contain Satan's Familiar).

He is not Presidential material. Neither is the Matron, who is still befuddled by the loss of the Soviet Union and unclear on fine distinctions between The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Great Britain, and England.

Indeed, it is just fine with her that the future President is smarter than she is! My God, she hopes so!

The other underpinning of anti-intellectualism has some merit, however. The Matron's favorite French philosopher (okay, really the only one she knows) Michel Foucault famously posited that the ability to create Truth is the ultimate power.

Just consider what Truth--the one truth, my truth, the sole truth that I the wise one pass onto you--has wrought. Fundamentalism of all stripes, you name it. Truth isn't something that exists all pretty on a shelf and untouchable.

Truth operates in the real world, on bodies and in lives. Truth, certainty, fueled several men who flew airplanes into tall buildings.

So the Matron thinks it's important to question our academic and intellectuals, the religious leaders and the politicians who make proclamations, who produce Truth.

Oh, where are those weapons of mass destruction?

Anyway.

So she thinks that suspicion of those in the 'know' also has that more legitimate leg. But she's pretty sure that Gerson is building an argument solely out of that more problematic egalitarian mandate.

So Obama seems superior?

The Matron has another complaint. Gerson's prose leans just a little too hard on a "that man is too big for his britches" stance. The Matron also can think of a rather ugly historical phrase used for Black men in just that position. She wonders just how close a textual analysis Gerson's editors did. She hopes he has a good psychoanalyst.

Barack Obama, superior?

Sounds like just what we need to get out of this mess.