Smart People

WASHINGTON -- Republican Rep. Paul D. Ryan returned to Congress on Tuesday, his political star rising even if his political future remains uncertain. The Wisconsin congressman and GOP vice presidential nominee has dismissed talk of a 2016 presidential run, saying Americans are tired of politics, and he described the "shock" of losing on election night as a "foreign experience. " For now, he is retaking his perch on the House Budget Committee, the venue that launched him into the presidential campaign as Mitt Romney's running mate and which also produced the austerity blueprint that defines the Republican Party.

A bunch of us were sitting around Sunday talking about truth and weirdness, of which there's an abundance this long, hot summer. The group consisted of four writers, a teacher and a social worker, pretty smart people all of them. What's more, we were sipping a little wine and, as everyone knows, wine makes smart people even smarter.

SO WHICH will be harder to spot this season -- Mark Foley campaign signs or movie ads for "Idiocracy"? If Foley had been as stealthy about messaging teenage pages as 20th Century Fox has been in releasing this dystopian social satire, Foley might still be the honorable member from Florida's 16th Congressional District. "Idiocracy" couldn't be more undercover if it were wearing a burka: a film released without an ad campaign, without movie trailers, without media screenings.

“You didn't build that” stands a good chance of becoming one of the indelible, hot-button phrases of Campaign 2012. Mitt Romney and Republicans will use President Obama's words to attack him as the business-unfriendly  Bureaucrat in Chief. Democrats will defend the sentiment as common sense - suggesting only that no one who succeeds in business makes it entirely on their own. Obama's words about private enterprise resonate because they fit into perennial themes: the conservative notion that only unfettered individuals can build a rich and free society vs. the liberal idea that society (and sometimes government)

Americans are an inquisitive bunch; we're nosy about others' affairs and not a little introspective about many of our own. How else to explain the plethora of talk shows, of on-air analysts and therapists, the well-subscribed advice columns? We talk about money, spousal relations, sex. We talk about everything, in fact, except race. Race, apparently, has become to the 1990s what sex was in the 1930s. Certainly people had sex in the '30s, but they didn't much talk about it--at least not publicly.

Bill Pope, cinematographer ("The Matrix" series, "SpiderMan 2"): "You know those little black squiggles next to the names of the theaters? Those indicate what sort of sound systems they have, like a black triangle for THX. If the theater doesn't have a black squiggle, I'm not going. "I also like a great big theater full of people.

Morgan Freeman doesn't have many science- or science fiction-related films on his resume of almost 100 motion pictures over the last few decades. Although he played a U.S. president who displayed calm while a massive meteor careened toward Earth in 1998's "Deep Impact," and God in 2007's "Evan Almighty," his roles have been mostly grounded in the real world. But Freeman has been involved for the last several years in "Through the Wormhole With Morgan Freeman," a series on Discovery's Science Channel that reflects the Oscar winner's long-standing interest in large questions surrounding the universe and existence.

GOT IT. Next point? These days, people get the picture quickly -- or think they do. We do everything faster, not just because we're busy but because speed is fun. Speed rivets attention. Speed blasts you out of boredom. Nothing is boring if it's fast enough. But slow is agonizing. So many of us zip through life so fast we're beyond busy, we're crazybusy. Yet there is no correlation between a fast life and a happy life.

My parents have been calling me while I've been at the conventions for the last two weeks, asking if I have any "news." These people clearly don't read my columns like they say they do. I explained to them that the odds of securing an otherwise unreported tidbit at a staged event attended by every journalist in the world were about the same as anyone actually saying the Republican convention was in St. Paul, where it technically was, instead of...