Below the Fold...

Tom Friedman cries about how much America's infrastructure sucks and how instead of investing in invention and engineering new technologies and products, we invested in creating more and more creative financial schemes. And we all know how that story ended.

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

I think though the problem is not only where we emphasized our efforts, and one could make some pretty effective arguments against the amount of IQ actually on Wall Street considering our current financial woes, it's that intelligence and discourse have actually become things to be reviled in America. If you're too smart, you're an elitist. Heard that before? Yes, we should feel bad about actually be curious about the outside world and taking the time to actually learn a thing or two about it, like say where other countries are on a map. Here's to hoping the country takes a drastic course correction on Jan. 20th.