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Quote of the Day: Beer and Books
“Beer is to dumb guys what books are to smart ones — Just having a lot of them makes you feel a whole lot smarter.” — Stephen Pastis
There is a lot of truth in both ends of that quote. Drink enough beer and you do feel smarter. You may not be smarter and you may not act smarter, but sure enough you feel a whole lot smarter. It doesn’t matter if you are a dumb guy or a smart guy, either – at least not in my experience.
A lot of smart guys do feel a whole lot smarter if they have a lot of books. I am not sure it works that way. It depends on how you define “smarter.” If you actually read the books, you become more knowledgeable but I am not sure you become more intelligent. That assumes the books are worth reading. Fill up on an exclusive literary diet of books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, and The Communist Manifesto, and I don’t think you will actually become more knowledgeable or more intelligent. In that sense, having a lot of them will make you smarter in the same way as having a lot of beers does. You might even feel smarter.
Regardless, knowledge is good. If you pick the right books – and read them – you might become smarter. Just stacking up piles of books without reading them may make you feel a whole lot smarter, but again only in the same way having a whole lot of beers does.
If you want to be perceived as smarter, write a book. It does not make you any smarter, but everyone else assumes you are. Trust me on that one. I am no smarter than I was before I had my first book published. I get the same thing from many of people that meet me for the first time after they realize I have written a book: “Boy, you must be really smart.” It is only after they get to know me they realize I am smarter for having written a lot of books in the same way I am smarter after having a lot of beers.
The only difference is you don’t wake up hungover after having a lot of books the way you do after having a lot of beers.
Published in Group Writing
Nothing like a good beer quotation.
I don’t know. If you read something through for more than twenty-four hours (Why do those authors write 1200-page books?), you might be much worse for wear the next day.
Reagan held that everyone read The Communist Manifesto. The ones that understood it became anti-Communists.
Exactly!
One of the best gigs as a writer is to ghost write a book for a politician or some other kind of celebrity.
Well, there is this one, too:
Beer is proof that God wants us to be happy. – Benjamin Franklin
No, it doesn’t.
True, but if we simply read the quote…
…again more carefully, we realize that it assumes the quote means something that it clearly does not.
The quote is amusing because of the restrictive condition just having. The implicit contrast is between “reading them” and “not reading them”. What makes the quote amusing is that the second category is identified people who are “smart”, when their feeling is a result of being not smart.
To be correctly called “smart”, a person must have the ability to perform basic abstract critical thinking, which includes the ability to recognize the difference between two distinct categories that bear a superficial resemblance.
But these people who are “smart” in their own self-conceit and that of the public have confused “having” with “reading”.
The way I heard it was,
What is a communist?
Someone who read Marx and Engels.
What is an anti-communist?
Someone who understood Marx and Engels.
Thanks for the throw-back to an old-school QOTD!
*****
Here’s the QOTD Signup Sheet for January 2023 – open to all Ricochet Members.
From the place where beer and knowledge converged:
Always a special place in my heart for Faber College…
There used to be a Wall St area dive bar called The Racoon Lodge. I’m not sure if they made it through Covid. I recall walking past one day and they had a blackboard outside on the sidewalk. It usually announced something like…
”Happy Hour All Day!”
or
“Free Fries with Pitchers”
This particular day it said…
”Beer. Helping ugly girls have sex since 2000 BC”
I prefer to read books by the best authors, like Tolkien, Zaloga, and Lardas. I am convinced they make me smarter.
Beer has a shelf life.
So do some books.
I was in the local library the other day. Looking at the politics section… oh, I just got P.J. O’Rourke in my head and figured I’d take a look at what they’ve got… ho-ho! They had A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land and that appeared to be it.
funny collection of essays I’ve probably already read, stuff I generally agree with, said better than I can say it – good material for plagiarizing so I’ll sound smarter…
the book was like a panfish bobber in a lake of crap books all negative towards Trump written by all sorts of people, mostly journalists, either print or tv I guess. Book after book after book. Then I got an idea… my late mom, a bleeding-heart liberal, had, I’d say we’re going back easily 25 years ago a book by James Carville about how much he disliked Ken Starr or whatever. I wonder if they have it? Nope. Nothing by Anne Coulter (hey, why not? I had free time and it’s not like I’m buying anything: it’s the public library…) either. They didn’t seem to be stocking much at all in the way of conservative writers, hold on, they didn’t seem to be stocking anything that covered politics earlier than 2016, and it was all – except for the PJ book, left of center.
I figure they regularly clear the shelves of the anti-Republican books to make room for the latest crop. I hate to see any book thrown away, but it wouldn’t surprise me if no one will ever check out Adam Schiff 2021 “bestseller” Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. So… a couple of years from now, after sufficient dust is gathered, out it goes for something else.
Librarians curate collections.