Quote Originally Posted by 120mm View Post
Marc, you got my sarcastic point about Petraeus, entirely. What also interests me about the guy, is that we had a couple of discussions during the conference and he seemed genuine and smart.

My point about anti-intellectuals, is that they tend to have good coping skills for one set of familiar situations. Unfortunately, they lack the imagination and desire to prepare themselves for a different set of unfamiliar situations.

In other words, being anti-intellectual discards the baby with the bath-water. While one can be overly-intellectual, and embrace new things without healthy skepticism like your Australopithecenes, most people I label as "anti-intellectual" were saying things like "They're just truck drivers, they'll never have to use their rifles" in early 2003 in Kuwait.

It is not easy to be well-read in the military, and it is not easy to have worked with your hands in academia, from what I've seen and experienced.
You may have the misfortune to discover (if you haven't already) that there are many in the academic world that also do not have the imagination to prepare themselves for new or different situations. I've encountered many academics over the years who refuse to believe that military personnel are capable of critical or rational thinking. There are also a fair number out there who feel that studying military history somehow makes you a militarist or Nazi and that it should be carved away from the mainstream of historical study (while, of course, keeping their pet niche of environmental history or some mutant version of gender studies). Anti-intellectualism in the sense you use the term is sadly very alive and well within academia.