PLEASE NOTE: This was written a day or two before the news broke about the death of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Trump has been quite silent since the President's announcement, but I decided to publish this anyhow. Who knows when Clown-in-Chief Trump might want to start mouthing off again!
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Mr. Trump, sir: Every time you open your blow hole to crow about how brilliant you are; every time you interrupt an interviewer ten times during every statement he or she tries to make or question he or she tries to ask you… Well, sir, just the fact that you are totally unable to listen to anybody on any subject proves that you cannot possibly be the smartest person on the planet.
One important thing that most intelligent people have in common is that we know how to listen to others and learn from them. If you cannot listen, you cannot learn. You can’t learn that other people have valuable knowledge that might actually reinforce your opinion. Or, of course, you might have to face the fact that you at least appear to others to be a monumental ignoramus with a special talent for making himself look like the modern version of a court jester. In other words, you have become the laughing stock of the country and, possibly, the world.
Recent polls show that should you, by some serious voting machine malfunction, get the nomination for president (if you were actually serious about running), you might get a few votes against President Obama. The polls I’ve seen in the last few weeks indicate that an overwhelming majority of republican, independent, and democrat voters would not vote for you in a million years. A few might, but probably wouldn’t. I am happy to know that you don’t stand a snowball’s chance…
Now on to the larger issue, since you don’t seem to care that you are now the official clown for a large majority of the planet’s population. That larger issue has to do with the president’s intellectual abilities.
I can only tell you about my own experience as a student, but I suspect it’s similar in some respects to Obama’s experience. The main differences are that I am a white female and he “isn’t one of us”. Oh yeah… on my mother’s side of the family, I am a second generation Russian-American Jew. Never mind that my English/Irish father’s side of the family have been citizens of the U.S. since before the revolution. I’m sure you’d cross me off the list of possibly intelligent people just because I am a female who is legally Jewish, despite my own choice of religion. Nobody likes a smart broad, and anti-Semitism is about as hard to overcome as racism is.
So here’s my story. I was a lousy student for the first twelve years of my education. I was just bored out of my mind. I did very well in subjects that interested me and ignored the others. The principal of my grammar school felt it was critical that I be advanced a couple of grades, just for intellectual stimulation to get me interested and help me learn to study. Mom, misguided as she was, felt it was more important that I remain with my ‘little friends.’ She was raised to believe that a girl couldn’t be a good and obedient wife and mother if she thought she was smart.
By the time I was in high school, my family was convinced that I must be mentally retarded. They had the school administer an IQ test. No one would tell me my score. My mother wouldn’t tell me because, she said, she didn’t want me to think I was smart. It would make me too vain.
I almost flunked out of high school because I never learned to study. I did flunk out of my first try in college. I didn’t know how to study, or even that it was necessary. Besides, I was having too much fun to bother. I failed on my second attempt too. I was learning to study at the same time I was learning that I couldn’t work a full-time night job and carry a full load in college during the day. That was more a burn-out than an intellectual failure.
When I was in my 30s, I discovered employer tuition reimbursement programs. For the most part, I had to study what my employer was willing to pay for. If I got grades below a C, I wouldn’t get a penny of reimbursement. To get all my money back, I had to ace all my classes. No problem, once I got serious.
By the time my ex and I moved to Colorado and I went to work for a major oil company, I had been on the Dean’s List every quarter or semester of my employer-funded education. The lowest GPA I got may have been as low as 3.5. It was usually closer to 3.8.
My first geology instructor suggested I take the Mensa test. The very idea terrified me, but he finally convinced me. I took it and learned that my IQ is in the 99th percentile—one percentage point higher than required for Mensa membership.
Sometime later, I learned that IQ is not a measure of intelligence per se, but rather a measure of one’s potential. The intelligence part is determined by what you do with that potential. Some of the smartest and wisest people I have known have above-average IQs that are well below genius level. Some of the highest IQ people I have known are dumber than dirt, never bothered by a serious thought beyond partying and (in their words) getting laid. I know because I asked them what made them join Mensa or Intertel, an organization exclusively for people with IQs in the top one percent.
President Obama and I had some common childhood situations. My father died when I was just over a year old, so I was raised by a single mother, as was Obama. His mother went to school and got a doctorate. My mother didn’t finish high school, but passed the California civil service exam on her first try and went on to a highly successful career with the state. All things considered, her success was quite amazing. She was at the right place at the right time: World War II was underway and the men had gone off to fight for their country. Women (including my mother) entered the workplace in a serious way for the first time.
My mother’s job was a good one. She earned enough to keep a roof over our heads, to feed us well, and had enough left over for plenty of good times too. The rest of the family on her side were what qualified as solidly upper middle class, or higher. They spoiled me rotten. I may have had cultural advantages unavailable to Obama. First, I was white. Secondly, my family was part of the higher end of ‘society’ in our small city.
After a layoff in Colorado, I returned to school to complete a degree. No employer tuition reimbursement this time! Just a full scholarship, an old dorm room in what had become a faculty apartment building, a Pell Grant, and student loans to take care of books, groceries, etc.
Shortly before the end of my senior year, I received a letter at my sister and brother-in-law’s home, my official residence while I was in the private and exclusive college I attended. It was from the school, and it was sent to notify me that I was to be awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key. At the time, I had no idea what that was, but my family certainly knew! My sister, who was seventeen when I was born, and her husband rejoiced like very proud parents. I was actually ready to blow the whole thing off. They wouldn’t allow that and, once they told me what it signified, I didn’t have to be convinced to RSVP for the presentation ceremony and dinner and order my key.
The PBK award is presented to those with a demonstrated lifetime of academic excellence. I graduated cum laude, not magna cum laude--having been too busy with work-study jobs to take the honors classes available to me. My final cumulative GPA was 3.75. It’s probably higher now, since I took the required classes for a work-related certificate in Graphics and Multimedia and earned a cumulative GPA of 4.0 for that course of study.
As much as this “late bloomer” achieved, my achievements are not even close—even academically—to those achieved by the president. I don’t usually like to talk about this stuff. I really prefer to keep it private, unless I’m highly motivated. I prefer the real people who have comprised most of my friends for most of my life. When they are co-workers, they have always been aware that I’m very good at my job. But most of them are as good at their jobs as I am at mine and there is enough mutual respect to go around without mouthing off about it.
Besides, the anti-intellectualism that is so common these days tends to scare people off. There are a few who hate you if they even suspect you have a high IQ (without really understanding that it’s only an indicator of potential). Smart people are not threatened by other smart people. No point in bragging about it.
Mr. Trump, you recently made some horribly racist remarks regarding the president’s intellectual abilities. The fact that your uber-rich friends’ kids didn’t get into Ivy League colleges is probably because they were not high achievers. No amount of money can motivate ho-hum students who believe they’ll succeed simply because of the balance in their family’s bank accounts or the square footage of the mansions in which they live.
The college from which I graduated was filled with kids from very rich families, kids who attended the most prestigious prep schools and simply didn’t make the grade. Instead, they ended up in some very excellent private colleges that offered the opportunity for top-notch learning. Far too many of them had no interest in learning anything. They partied, traveled to exotic places during breaks, and spent what could have been study time in AA meetings (we had our own AA branch right on campus). Fortunately, the school has lost its party-school label and has regained its former reputation of being a top-notch academic institution, a label it has worn proudly since its founding in 1831.
If you were nearly as intelligent as you like to make yourself out to be, you might understand that sometimes having less lights a fire in some of us, a fire that makes us passionate about doing more. Maybe we would like to have an opportunity to earn a little more in a better job. Some of us are just passionate about learning.
Thanks to some of my more recent learning, I understand that the only difference between you and a brilliant African-American is (genetically) so minute that it doesn’t really count at all. The visible differences (skin color, etc.) are partially the result of physical adaptations that made survival possible in a variety of environments. When our common African ancestors left Africa and migrated to different parts of the world, their skin color, size and shape of noses, etc. changed to accommodate their new environments. Northern Europeans became lighter-skinned, for example, since they no longer had to compensate for the harsh African conditions.
Those who remained in Africa and the Middle East didn’t suddenly get stupid because they didn’t migrate to other parts of the world. Their brains and yours? I have studied and worked with brilliantly intelligent South African scholars and incredibly stupid and bigoted pure white, spoiled rich kids. And vice versa.
And I might add that the most self-confident and intelligent people almost never are so egocentric to need to constantly tell everyone how special they are. People notice. Only the insecure, the biggest a-holes and clowns amongst us feel the need to constantly boast about what they know is not true about themselves, in an attempt to cover up their own inadequacies. The rest of us sit back quietly and just laugh at the clowns who have no idea what fools they are making of themselves.
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