December 8, 2006

Say it loud, he's smart and I'm proud.

I'm talking about the new Liberal leader, Stéphane Dion, who won me over during the painful wait for the final vote count.

While I was watching Michael Ignatieff (tipped off that he had lost he was still forced to face the nation for a full half-hour with a smile that would eat ceramics), my husband was reciting Dion's intellectual resumé.

Canadians are raised not to use the word "intellectual" in polite discourse as it is seen as impossibly pompous.

But Stéphane Dion is the real thing. His first two degrees are in political science at Laval, his doctorate is in sociology from the Institut d'études politiques de Paris and his career has been in the precise mind mechanics that make up federal-provincial relations and the interpretation of our Constitution.

He has taught in Montreal, Washington and Paris; he is bilingual, well travelled and understands that climate change is about to stomp the species into the dark ages and yet he remains sufficiently idealistic to inspire others.

He will be Canada's next prime minister and he is an intellectual. Think of that.

The provincial exception

Given that politics generally attracts the fanged and hungry rather than the clever, it is a tribute to Canadians that we don't actually object to intelligence in a federal leader. Anywhere else, it can finish off a candidate before the first baby is even kissed.

Intelligence isn't always permitted in provincial politics. Learn this the agonizing way. Go to the website of new Alberta premier Eddie Stelmach. Then go to Ontario Premier Dalton's McGuinty's. Click between the two. Lose your will to live.

A CBC report described Stelmach as Ralph Klein without the "fizz and sizzle," which might be code to mean Stelmach doesn't tipple. His website makes you wish he did.

It isn't the grammatical errors that throw you, or even his eerie resemblance to the Daily Show's resident expert John Hodgman. What hurts the head is the call to action:

"I am committed to leading a government that takes this responsibility seriously and uses every available tool to manage resources efficiently and deliver services in communities in the most appropriate way relative to the degree of need." Stop it, Eddie, you're making me dizzy.

Click on McGuinty's website and watch him on your screen answering the question "What do you do in your free time?" (I swear, he's John Candy playing the mayor of Melonville.)

McGuinty: "The smell of baking bread … there's nothing like it!"

That's enough from you, McGuinty. I've shut down the website.

The New Dumb

Americans are notorious for disliking intelligent people, especially intelligent politicians. JFK and Bill Clinton only got away with it because of their astonishing affability. They "passed," as a light-skinned black person might put it.

The reason is the New Dumb, as Ralph Steadman calls it in a memoir of his friendship with the late Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. But the New Dumb hasn't taken hold everywhere, thank goodness.

The British prefer Oxbridge politicians who make a show of not appearing to be down to earth. The idea is to soft-pedal your inner thug, and then shiv your opponents in question period.

Or you can just be honest about your intellectual gifts. Like Germaine Greer.

The art historian and commentator was recently given a "Golden Bull" award by something called the Plain English Campaign for having written in the Guardian newspaper: "The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesized manifold."

I was all for her immolation too until she explained herself in a subsequent column. "Synthesized manifold" was a phrase that would be known to reasonably educated Guardian readers, she argued, especially those familiar with aesthetic theory. It is "an English version of a basic concept in Kant's Critique of Judgment, first published in English in 1790."

She went on to explain in beautiful prose the distance between what is a work of art and the huge wave of everything else around us. We are slammed with undifferentiated, meaning unsynthesized, sensory data, she wrote. She was writing about discontinuity.

I don't trust the peculiar Greer, but she got this one right. Score one for the intellectuals. "Unsynthesized manifold," I sing to myself as I bake bread and putter about the house, like Dalton McGuinty on day off.

Treading lightly

When it comes to being an intellectual in Canada, or indeed anywhere, the trick is to blend things. Take light things seriously and serious things lightly. Try to find a middle ground, and you'll be a wise, popular politician.

Take the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Aside from being the funniest movie ever made, Borat, which tracks an ignorant man's progress through the world's most blessed nation, is grotesque in nature and difficult to watch.

It is also brilliant, for the simple reason that its creator, Sacha Baron Cohen, is brilliant. He wrote his thesis at Cambridge on the role of Jews in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Borat is Baron Cohen's thesis made into a comedy. It invites white southerners to display their true selves, and it is exquisite irony that some of them are now trying to sue him (they will fail) for their own moral and intellectual defects.

Borat offers a wonderful combination of cleverness and decency, wit and heart. Like the win of the confident, humane Dion over the icy, heartless Ignatieff; like Greer telling the Plain English people to get stuffed; like Baron Cohen writing in 1994 about the Jewish call at Passover to "Know the stranger, for thou wert strangers in Egypt," and then going on to make one strange hit movie. There is a place for intellectuals. It's right at our heart.