Intelligently Avoided the Audio

From Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot:

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject . . .

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.

The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.

I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature.

He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy.

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm . . . At fifteen, I couldn't say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album Charlie Parker with Strings. In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure.

Right after the election, a search on the Nexis journalism database for the following terms revealed these results. For "Al Gore and nerd," 804 articles. For "Al Gore and geek," 826 articles. For "Al Gore and dork," 136. For "Al Gore and Poindexter," 110. For "Al Gore and homework," 966. Searches for "George W. Bush and" the words dumb, stupid, and idiot were unable to be completed because those queries "will return more than 1,000 documents." All of which was distilled perfectly in the election day headline in the London Daily Mail, "The Nerd Versus the Nincompoop."

Al Gore could have learned something about being a public nerd from watching this show. If only he had ditched the professional politicos who fumbled his 2000 campaign and hired the Buffy creator Joss Whedon to tell him how to sustain credibility by making fun of himself.

When one of a culture's guiding credos is that "all men are created equal," any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance.

I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of elements memorized; rattle off the kinds and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photsynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all of the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world--poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years.

The most bizarre episode in Puritan history is the Salem Witch Trials. Twenty innocent people were executed in Salem during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. Which is horrifying, yet manages to make for a surprisingly nice weekend getaway.

In the last twelve months I've taken trips to the sites of so many historical tragedies[.] Besides Gettysburg and Salem, I've dropped by Little Bighorn Battlefield . . . the North Dakota ranch where Theodore Roosevelt escaped when his wife and mother died on the same day; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; and the George W. Bush inauguration.

[From Sports Night]: "Because I love you I can say this. No rich young white guy has ever gotten anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks."

I'm so much more comfortable when we're bickering with each other than when we have to link arms and fight a common enemy.

Maybe sometimes, in quiet moments of reflection, my mom would prefer that I not burn eternally in the flames of hell when I die, but otherwise she wants me to follow my own heart.

Harry Middleton insists, "I think that a library should not proselytize. It should not sugarcoat and should not distort the facts or the truth in order to hide a controversy surrounding the president. Otherwise, it's just not fair to the public."
Meanwhile, in Yorba Linda, California: "First of all, I don't think a presidential library should necessarily bend over backwards to be objective and fair and inclusive of every important telling fact on all sides of the argument."