I can’t stop re-reading this interview in the NY Times Magazine. Deborah Solomon interviews Charles Murray about his new book, “Real Education,” and it’s like some morbidly funny train wreck and I can’t not look. Some choice excerpts:

Although attending college has long been a staple of the American dream, you argue in your new book, “Real Education,” that too many kids are now heading to four-year colleges and wasting their time in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree. Yes. Let’s stop this business of the B.A., this meaningless credential. And let’s talk about having something kids can take to an employer that says what they know, not where they learned it.

You’re not the first social scientist to knock the liberal arts, but you may be the first to insist that only 20 percent of all college students have the brains and abilities to understand their assigned reading. Eighty percent are not able to deal with college-level material, traditionally understood. Someone can sit down with Paul Samuelson’s textbook and stare at the pages and know what most of the words mean. That does not mean that they walk away from it understanding economics as it is taught in the textbook.

What do you propose that 18-year-olds do instead of trying to learn the difference between macro- and microeconomics? Oh, the world of work out there!

Do you see your new book as an extension of the “The Bell Curve,” which caused an uproar in 1994 by suggesting that people are only as promising as their I.Q. scores? In many ways, it is a distillation of things I’ve been thinking since “The Bell Curve.”

Europeans have historically defined themselves through inherited traits and titles, but isn’t America a country where we are supposed to define ourselves through acts of will? I wonder if there is a single, solitary, real-live public-school teacher who agrees with the proposition that it’s all a matter of will. To me, the fact that ability varies — and varies in ways that are impossible to change — is a fact that we learn in first grade.

I believe that given the opportunity, most people could do most anything. You’re out of touch with reality in that regard. You have not hung around with kids who are well in the lower half of the ability distribution.

Have you? [He has not.]

What do you make of the fact that John McCain was ranked 894 in a class of 899 when he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy? I like to think that the reason he ranked so low is that he was out drinking beer, as opposed to just unable to learn stuff.

What do you think of Sarah Palin? I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.

She attended five colleges in six years. So what?

Pompous a** is all I can come up with. And yet, while I’m shaking my head in disbelief that karma alone hasn’t mowed this guy down, I also can’t stop laughing. He’s such a jacka** and is totally unapologetic about it. Whether you agree with him or not (I don’t) you have to respect the ballsiness of someone who can write a damn book explaining why the smart people should be in charge and the dumb humans should do the work. Nice.

His argument implodes for me as soon as he gets to the nonsensical/illogical portion of the interview where he’s all for McCain and Palin regardless of their questionable intelligence. He just brushes those facts aside because they clearly have no relevance. When research scientists do that, they aren’t allowed to call it science—then it’s just called “making stuff up.”

I’m confused. Is Murray saying that only the smart people should be allowed to go to college and do the super important jobs, but we don’t want any of those smarties running the country? Is running the country not an important job? Maybe he classifies the presidency as one of those below-average-intelligence-havin’ labor jobs. If that’s the case, then I’m an even bigger fan of that smart Obama guy, who, it seems, is too smart to be running the country.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image: alec holst/school of visual arts