I'm smart but I'm not smart enough.

Not smart enough for what?

For the task ahead of me.

And what task is that?

Why, the same task facing every human being alive today.  Keeping the human species going as long as possible, at least another couple thousand years, if we can.

Why do you say that?

Despite the fact that the Cold War died down quite some time ago, the big thing that made us afraid the whole time is still there.  There are enough bombs to wipe us all off the face of the earth.  And we have to make sure that doesn't happen.

And how are you going to make sure that doesn't happen?

I don't know.  Like I said, I'm not smart enough.  I just hope that, collectively, we are.

...

The secret is culture.  Culture, and intellect, are unique among evolutionary traits.  Sharp teeth, thick skin, camouflage, all of these things serve a specific evolutionary purpose.  But our brains?  Our intellect?  They have managed to get us ahead in the food chain terms of things, but the evolutionary purpose of intellect and society is much harder to get your head around than that for something like claws, or eyes.

...

The idea is that culture, like anything else life engages in, is an evolutionary mechanism.  Societal constructs of things like attractiveness help favorable traits to persist, and the most favorable evolutionary trait in a human, any human, is the mind more than the body.  When a culture loses sight of this, it loses evolutionary ground and falls within a few generations behind those who recognize the value of creativity and abstract thought enough to find it sexy.

...

I want to be sexy, is what I'm saying.

Everyone on American television is so thin and sexy and in shape, but statistics say that Americans aren't. How many of us watch TV living vicariously through our favorite TV characters? We sit in dark rooms with flickering screens watching the two dimensional exploits of our better selves through the lens of bullshit glamor and sensationalist fiction and tolerate our pathetic, satiated lives because we have these amazing, sexy, heroic lives to watch and imagine they were our own. If any conspiracy ever was, there was one to dilute the value of our culture with so much drivel and loquacious verbal vomit that our minds would be reduced to overflowing sewers in a torrential downpour of horrendous intellectual waste, with no capacity left to realize how fucked we're getting.

State of the Union, 2012.

But it's terrible because it's a death of the individual creativity that is at stake, the atrophy of the imagination.  Terms like "Culture War" or the "Death of our Culture" only bear relevance to me insomuch as "American Culture" can come to be something respected in future history, known for its reason and open-minded democracy more than its superstitious hatred and cognitively dissonant derision for the poor, more for its love of civil rights and personal liberties than its tendency for faith-derived bickering.  What a waste of time.  What a waste of people.  Don't we realize how important the history is that we're creating?