There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #98

December 22, 2008 Mike Gold 10 Comments

Einstein can’t be classed as witless.
He claimed atoms were the littlest.
When you did a bit of splitting-em-ness
Frighten everybody shitless
There ain’t half been some clever bastards.
Probably got help from their mum
(who had help from her mum)
There ain’t half been some clever bastards.
Now that we’ve had some,
let’s hope that there’s lots much more to come.
– There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards,
Ian Dury And The Blockheads

This world is propelled by the energy of the clever. Not necessarily the smart, but most certainly the clever. Clever people need not be Einstein-smart, and to my experience a whole lot of Einstein-smart people are not clever.

We need originality in everything we do. That’s how our society grows; that’s where the new stuff comes from. Stagnation is the enemy: it’s corrosive. Complacency is the enemy: it breeds stagnation. We need more clever ideas. Originality comes from clever people. We need more clever people.

They’re out there, but a lot of them are invisible – even to themselves. It takes a certain amount of courage to show your cleverness. You don’t want to be perceived as an outsider, and you don’t want to be thought of as weird. You most certainly do not want to be wrong: we do horrible things to people who are wrong.

Most of all, you don’t want to fail.

If I had but one piece of advice for 2009, it would be this: Dare to be wrong. Dare to fail. Dare to try and try again. Shake up the system, shake up the planet. Take a chance. Do something different.

We need clever people now more than ever. We need somebody to look at a battery and intuit how it can move a car, a truck, and an airplane. We need somebody to look at the all the never-ending religious and tribal wars (I’m no longer certain there’s a difference) and see a way to help people get past their decrepit hostilities. We need somebody who can figure out how to preserve the vital but dying aspects of our culture: daily newspapers, moribund music, television drama, “comic” books. All have run aground.

We need someone who can offer up a substitute for greed. When the economy tanked, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, a smart man who is not clever, said he thought he was managing our financial course correctly but he hadn’t taken into consideration the overwhelmingly obvious: we are, by our very nature, greedy. Rich people want more wealth, but poor people who become wealthy want more as well. Me, I can eat more barbecue brisket than you can put on my plate, but even I figured out I have to establish limits, and I’m working on that. Some clever person has to figure out how to wean us off of our natural greed. It’s killing us.

Barack Obama is smart – and he’s smart enough to put a whole lot of smart people in his inner circle, no matter how that may challenge his authority. I just hope Barack Obama is clever.

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Next week: New Year’s Revolutions. Please feel free to stimulate my throbbing brainpan by offering your suggestions in our comments section.