In a special op-ed to CNN, Frida Ghitis wrote an article entitled, “Are men stupid?” If you toss out all the intelligent men in the world, even those of mediocre intelligence, the ‘yes’ answer is pretty much a slam dunk.

Mr. Ghitis chose to focus on the life and travails of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards. Even though Mr. Edwards still looks young (is that because only his hair dresser knows?), he was not born yesterday. In 2006, he enter into an illicit affair with “cinematographer” Rielle Hunter. It’s not as if he had not heard of Bill Clinton or hundreds or other men who strayed off the reservation and were unfaithful to their spouses. This knowledge included the awareness that in all likelihood they would that they would be caught literally or figuratively with their pants down.

Ms. Ghitis has a list that includes such men of outstanding discretion as former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, former Congressman Anthony Wiener, and former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer (ooh, it hurts to say this one because Spitzer knows a thing or two about redemption.

But as we all know, it’s not that men have an exclusive corner on lack of wisdom. One of the most famous answers to any question was “All of them.” This was Sarah Palin’s response to Katie Couric question about what newspapers and magazines the then governor of Alaska reads. Ms. Palin’s pearl came only after she couldn’t think of a single publication that she reads.

Even though President Barack Obama currently enjoys a double-digit lead among women versus George Romney, it does not necessarily prove that women are smarter than men. That number has diminished considerably over the past month and theoretically could disappear. African-Americans are much more attuned to the struggles of the poor and minorities in the U.S. and around the world, but there is a burgeoning number of Herman Cains who if they existed twenty years ago, would not have spoken in public.

In the fifteen elections since 1952, Americans have voted five times for Richard Nixon as either president or vice-president. Additionally they have voted for either George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush seven times as president or vice-president. In only four elections since 1952 (1964, 1976, 1996, and 2008) has the ballot not included a Nixon or a Bush. The 67% “presence rate” of a Nixon or Bush since 1952 could not have been possible without the participation of women.

So while John Edwards may be today’s poster child for being “stupid” (a pejorative term with which I am not fully comfortable), it is important to remember that the genes of men and women share a 98.7% similarity.

Perhaps it would do us well to concern ourselves less with who is “stupid” and who is not. Instead we could focus on elevating the intelligence of all of us, regardless of our gender. As the great philosopher Forrest Gump said, “stupid is as stupid does.” Let’s try to “do smart.”

The post Are men stupid? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

People who have  difficulty gathering and processing information have plenty of company. We all have moments that humble us. Fortunately, there is still considerable forgiveness in our society, so most times we can mess something up and rebound and get back on track.

Harboring a grudge against a neutral observer is an odd sort of behavior. But such is the attitude that Sarah Palin takes towards Katie Couric. I don’t know enough Palin supporters to determine if they think that her continued bitterness towards Katie Couric is an acceptable form of behavior. Fortunately most people have the ability to eat humble pie and acknowledge when they had a bad moment. A good example would be Claire McCaskill in “plane-gate” when she apologized for unwise decisions and took the necessary steps to remedy them. David Letterman acted similarly when he was unfaithful to his wife.

Katie Couric is not exactly a “gotcha journalist.” If anything she has been criticized for asking softball questions and paying more attention to the frivolous than the serious. Actually, it’s that reputation which may have landed her the interview with Sarah Palin that virtually every other reporter wanted after John McCain snatched the Alaska governor out of obscurity and made her his choice to be the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee in 2008.

Since Governor Palin seemed to be somewhat ill-informed about this issues that would face a president or vice-president, Katie Couric wanted to know where the Alaska governor is getting her information. What newspapers and magazines did she regularly read? This is not the early days of pioneering in Alaska when a New York Times might arrive two or three times a year by dogsled. This is the era of the internet where anyone can read virtually any publication on-line. Couric’s question was eminently fair.

Governor Palin said that she read “all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.” If someone can’t name any of them, isn’t it plausible to conclude that she really means none of them.

It’s very likely that Sarah Palin has indeed read from the mainstream media, what her friend Rush Limbaugh calls the drive-by media. The question from Katie Couric may have just caught her off guard. We all have “senior moments” well before we even approach senior citizenship. Once it happened, Sarah Palin had options. Additionally, she had the opportunity to think about how she would explain her non-answer rather than being caught off guard as she apparently was in the interview.

Instead, Governor Palin called it an unfair question; one designed to “get her.” What Katie Couric was doing throughout the interview was to provide both herself and the viewing public with some information that could assure the viewing public that Sarah Palin was indeed informed and intelligent about major issues facing the nation and the world. If the governor could not answer a question such as what she reads, then the American people would have good cause to question her qualifications to serve on a national level.

Actually in the rest of the interview Governor Palin acquitted herself reasonably well, except when she tried to defend her previous statement that living across the Bering Strait from Russia gave her solid foreign policy credentials.

Following the interview, she could have said that she was new to this national spotlight and acknowledged that she had to refine her interviewing skills. She could have said that she was eager to learn and felt that her previous accomplishments had indicated that she could rise to the level of a job. But she didn’t.

Here we are over two years later. Sarah Palin has had some time on her hands, especially since she resigned her governorship for semi-inexplicable reasons well before her term was over. For many, time is an opportunity to reflect and even acknowledge past mistakes.

When it comes to the 2008 Katie Couric interview, Sarah Palin has expressed no regret or even explanation as to why she couldn’t answer the “what does she read” question. Rather, when Katie Couric announced that she would be resigning as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Palin could not resist the opportunity to mock Couric. Keep in mind that Couric had never mocked anything that Palin had said, she only reported them.

As reported by CNN,

Appearing on Fox News Tuesday (May 3), Palin mocked the CBS newswoman who told People Magazine she is looking forward to a new position that will facilitate “multi-dimensional storytelling.”

“Yeah, and I hear that she wants to now engage in more ‘multi-dimensional story telling’ versus I guess just the ‘straight on, read into the, that teleprompter screen story telling,'” Palin said. “More power to her. I wish her well in her – ‘multi-dimensional story telling.'”

Katie Couric has excelled in quite a few interviews and occasional in-depth stories. Before she became a co-host of NBC’s Today Show, she was a Pentagon correspondent who applied many of the reporting skills she learned at the University of Virginia. She clearly has the credentials to say multi-dimensional story telling. Almost by definition, such reporting stands in contrast to the news reading which is the primary function of a news anchor.

Sarah Palin has still not said whether or not she plans on running for president in 2012. I’d like to believe that she’s been spending some of her hiatus reading thoughtful and informative articles in newspapers and magazines. Even if she has, whatever credentials she might have to be chief executive will be tarnished by her inability to drop a grudge, one that emanates from an incident in which there is no one to blame but herself. Such an attitude may be acceptable to her natural right-wing base, but it probably doesn’t serve her well with the broader public, whose support she will need if she wants to be president. She might want to go back to the western coast of Alaska, look out on the Bering Strait, and do some reflecting.

The post To Sarah Palin: About that grudge… appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’m hungry; thinking about getting a snack in fifteen minutes.  Considering my waistline, there’s a lot that’s unhealthy about that and it reflects much of the way our world operates today.  My hankering for food even though I don’t need it reflects my need for immediate gratification.  As a country, we tend to want what we want and want it now.  This short-term thinking is reinforced by the media that lives by the 24-hour news cycle.

But when news comes to us so quickly we extrapolate that the solutions to our problems will come just as quickly.  They don’t.  The short news cycle reinforces a myopic view of what’s happening and implies that all will be well if we just act now!

Imagine if we looked at solving problems over the course of a generation, or perhaps even longer.  One thing is that our options for solutions would grow exponentially.  But what may be more important is that long-term change is the only realistic path we have because our system is so corrupted and we as a people ….. well, many of us are not too bright.  Until we accept these realities and the burdens that they place on our growth, we’ll spin our wheels, and the spinning will be the news.

First we have to examine ourselves, or to quote the great philosopher Michael Jackson, we need to look at “the man in the mirror.”   While there are remarkable people amongst us, far too many people lack civic knowledge, and more important, the ability to logically process the information they have.  If they had more information and could process it better, they’d agree with Mark Twain’s famous words; “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know.  It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”  [Is Mark Twain American enough for Sarah Palin to consider these words?]

Before trying to put a positive spin on change occurring over generations rather than news cycles, we need to factor in another adage, “You get what you measure.”  The wisdom of this assertion raises are two problems: (1) We may not be measuring the correct things and (2) we spend an enormous amount of time believing in statistics about things that simply can’t be measured accurately.

In the book “Super Freakonomics,” economists Stephen Levin and Stephen Dubner depict the importance of “out of the box” analytical thinking examining phenomena such as why 38 people watched Kitty Genovese be murdered in New York and what caused the 1960s crimes explosion.  The surprises that they spring on us reflect the skepticism with which we need to view conventional data.

What does this have to do with advancing our society by thinking in terms of generational rather than election-cycle change?  It’s because our view of change is microscopic (one day to the next; one year to the next) and our strategies are based on short-term reward, be it for the politician winning the next election, the CEO posting increased earnings, the television network executive reporting higher ratings.

Here are a few areas in which measurement is biased towards the short-term and which prohibit our ability to view meaningful change when it happens.

Education:

Economics:

To look at generational change means that we must get away from conventional forms of measurement.  In fact, in some ways we may have to do the unthinkable – actually observe without measuring.  How can we measure if someone will become a life-long learner when they’re young?  How can we assess whether a business is sensitive to societal needs if we don’t use subjective criteria?

Our first step is to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers and to be suspicious of those (primarily politicians) who purport to know everything.  Additionally we have to resist the arguments of “simplifiers” such as the tea baggers who bring to the table twin detrimental attitudes of (a) if it’s good for me, I don’t care what happens to others, and (b) if we dumb things  down, we can all be “common people” and rule with the one and only correct kind of “common sense.”

We need to find ways to assess whether we’re taking steps that will result in long-term positive change without relying on short-term data.  We need to recognize that as humans, our world is ambiguous and does not lend itself to simple answers.  We need to be patient with others who are thinking outside the box to advance the goals of fairness and justice.  None of this is easy, but if we don’t try, it will be more of the “same old same old” and that machine will eventually break down.

The post Instant change is no change appeared first on Occasional Planet.