America's Geniuses

When young I used to hear, quite often, that a genius was someone able to hold in her mind two contradictory ideas at once. The examples were many. Count all the Christians eager to go to Heaven but afraid to die. Or count the Republicans who fiercely maintain that Big Government is inherently error-prone, corrupt, tyrannical, stupid and "the problem," but they demand that Big Government administer the death penalty and tell us who can marry whom, while remaking Iraq. What reassures me today is the plenitude of geniuses right when we need them most.