Ted

For reasons I'll never know, author Toni Morrison's endorsement of Barack Obama for President is the top article on Memeorandum right now. I typically put very little weight behind the endorsements of authors or actors or sports figures, but obviously, people think this is important enough to talk about.

The version of the story linked at Memeorandum is from the ABC News blog Political Radar, and includes this quote explaining Morrison's endorsement:

"In thinking carefully about the strengths of the candidates, I stunned myself when I came to the following conclusion: that in addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.

"Our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities. Yet unleashing the glory of that future will require a difficult labor, and some may be so frightened of its birth they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb.

"There have been a few prescient leaders in our past, but you are the man for this time," she concludes.

When I read the effusive "That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom," I gagged reflexively at the sugary nothingness of what Morrison said.

"That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom."

I can hardly think of a more hollow, nonsensical statement, which a simple comparison destroys.

I can think of someone far more creative, and quantitatively far more brilliant than Barack Obama.

Would you vote for this guy?

Brilliant, with an eye for the future, and certainly creative, why isn't Ted Kaczynski Morrison's choice for president? Was it the sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole that ruled him out?

Brilliance and imagination are great things to have, but they do not in any way add up to equal wisdom. Taken with other factors, these God-given gifts can contribute to someone growing up to be a talented surgeon, a gifted teacher, or a national leader.

These gifts can also lead to abject madness... or horridly purple prose.

The do not, in and of themselves, equal wisdom.