by John Walters

I do not know how to put up dry wall. I’m not handy with tools. I am lost under the hood of a car (although I can fix a flat) or under a bathroom sink. I cop to all of it, and I respect people who learn these trades or simply know how to perform these jobs. There is value in what they do, and just because I likely have more book-learning than they do or earned better grades in school does not make me better than they are.

Likewise, not being well-educated does not make someone better-suited to perform jobs that demand an education. The tide of anti-intellectualism that is sweeping the country, the vainglory in being poorly educated or uneducated, is beyond distasteful. It is dangerous.

How can you not know truth if you don’t believe in a virgin mother who gave birth to someone who rose from the dead? What are you, an idiot?

Earlier this week Senator Jeff Sessions, President-Elect Donald Trump’s choice for U.S. Attorney General, was asked flat-out during his ratification hearing, “A secular person has just as good a claim to understanding the truth as a religious person, correct?” 

Sessions’ reply: “Well, I’m not sure.”

This wasn’t a conversation in the men’s room, or in a backroom office. This was televised for America, for the world to see. A man who, by the way is dead-set against radicalized members of another religion, was suggesting that you cannot measure truth as well unless you are religious while aspiring to the highest law enforcement position in the land. Justice is blind, but it carries rosary beads in its pocket.

Donald Trump wants Sessions to be your Attorney General. He wants a climate-change denial dude to head the EPA. He wants as his vice-president a man who ardently believes that homosexuals need to be sent away to be re-trained. As his commissioner on “vaccine safety” a man who does not believe in the safety of vaccines.

Let me be blunt: This is not bad for progressives and liberals. This is bad for everyone inside and outside the United States.

Allow me to introduce you to, if you don’t already know his story, Alan Turing. If you don’t know who Turing was, he was a brilliant British mathematician, a genuine genius, who in 1940 approached the English military and asked to be of service. At the time the Nazis were using an encryption machine, codenamed “Enigma,” that sent coded messages throughout Europe and into the Atlantic to coordinate maneuvers.

The simplest way to explain the Enigma machine: Imagine a typewriter. Now imagine that every key on that typewriter is attached to another typewriter full of keys. Now imagine that every key on those secondary typewriters is attached to yet another typewriter full of keys. Now consider that every day all the Germans would need to do is change the setting of one key on one of those typewriters to change the coded messages they sent.

Solving Enigma seemed virtually impossible. But Turing, who was socially awkward, introverted and, oh yeah, a closeted homosexual, insisted that he be allowed to help. The Brits relented. It’s worth noting here that being gay in Great Britain then was against the law. If word had gotten out that Turing was homosexual, he’d have been thrown in jail.

Fortunately, word did not get out. And after two years Turing, by building what was essentially the world’s first computer, cracked the Enigma code. But then Turing did something just as ingenious: He convinced his military superiors not to simply thwart every German maneuver. Turing saw the long game. He recognized that if the Allies simply used all of their new-found knowledge to undo Axis attacks that the Germans would be on to them and stop using Enigma.

Instead, Turing and his peers developed a calculus of only stopping certain attacks and allowing the Germans to succeed as well. Yes, they could have saved lives right away by stopping attacks on civilian ships, etc., but who knows how many lives that would have cost later on? That sort of long-term thinking takes intelligence and wisdom as well.

(And yes, you can watch The Imitation Game on Netflix right now if you didn’t see it in the theaters and learn most all of this).

The Allies won the war. The Nazis were defeated. Military experts later estimated that the cracking of the Enigma code shortened World War II by two years and saved 14 million lives. Fourteen million lives. That’s like the populations of New York City and Chicago combined.

That’s a pretty significant contribution from someone who, if the law of the day had been properly executed, would have been forbidden to lend his expertise. He’d have been rotting away in jail (If you don’t know how Turing met his end, I’ll spare you, but it wasn’t good and no one even knew of his contributions until 50 years after the war ended; the world owes him a huge thank you and a bigger apology).

The point is, people who are best trained to deal with a problem, be it drywall or an encryption machine, are the ones who should hold those jobs. Not people who simply think the way you do or are looking for the most efficient path to profit.

I’m reminded of another British World War II hero, Winston Churchill, who had been laughed out of office as an old fart and a worry wart in the mid-1930s, only to be called back after the Luftwaffe started flying bombing missions over London. In the mid-1930s Stanley Baldwin had been the Prime Minister and he adamantly refused to listen to Churchill’s repeated attempts to warn the House of Commons that the Germans were amping up their war machine. It was Baldwin and his party who led the  ouster of Churchill out of public life—temporarily.

Unlike Trump, who received at least three military deferments, Chuchill, a fellow child of privilege, volunteered and fought in Cuba, India, Africa twice, and Europe.

Ten years later, in 1947, the war was won, Churchill was a national hero, and Baldwin was turning 80. There was to be a huge birthday party and Churchill was asked to come and speak at it. Never one not to be forthright, Churchill wrote Baldwin a short note that said, and I paraphrase, “I wish you a Happy 80th birthday but I will not attend. I must be honest: it would have been far better for Great Britain if you had never been born.”‘

He was correct, of course. As we stand just one week until inauguration day, I wonder if we’ll all be thinking (or saying) that about the 45th president in a matter of weeks, months, or years. There are serious problems facing the planet, from climate change to the extinction of species, and we have installed as the most powerful man in the world someone who tweets about “Fake News” because he’s butt-hurt about someone trying to compromise his glory.

Intelligence matters. Training matters. Wisdom matters. Alan Turing, even if you completely downgrade his contribution, saved a minimum of 5 million lives. Anti-intellectualism benefits no one. Your grandfather or uncle or dad may have died in World War II if it weren’t for Turing. This is not a game.