On Monday evening, I overheard a New Albany city councilman explaining to a bystander how much more he knows about drainage issues than any number of trained experts in the field, and that our problems with stormwater primarily result from virulent conspiracies between city planners and a veritable mafia of builders.

I reached for my steaming wand, and thought immediately of Bayard R. Hall.

“(We) always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and hence attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and incompetence and goodness.”

Even though Hall might have written it yesterday, speaking perhaps as a resident of New Albany’s 3rd council district, or as a bemused observer of contemporary America’s penchant for creationist museums, tea-party circles and Palin for Dogcatcher campaigns, all competing for the attention of a benumbed populace forever mistaking spasm for thought, his words actually date all the way back to 1843.

Hall penned them in reference to the political scene in frontier Indiana, thereby illustrating that anti-intellectualism was a cankerous sore on the American body politic long before George W. Bush took office.

“Anti-intellectualism is a term that in one sense describes a hostility towards, or mistrust of, those who call themselves intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits. This may be expressed in various ways, such as an attack on the merits of science, education or literature.” — Wikipedia

From Hall, my thoughts raced to Richard Hofstadter. Those voters who have somehow managed to progress beyond the literary realm of “Left Behind” and the attractions of “Dancing with the Stars” might eventually come into contact with the work of the historian Hofstadter, whose 1964 book, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” charted the American cultural habit of loudly detesting the quality that separates humans from other mammals.

“The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.”

Hofstadter devoted his all too brief career to advancing the primacy of ideas, and exploring the ways that behavior (primarily in the political sense, but also in related pursuits) is related to the way people use, or refuse, their minds.

Ariel Dorfman, a writer, paraphrases Hofstadter’s findings:

“Anti-intellectualism had its origins ... in American traits that anteceded the nation’s founding: the mistrust of secular modernization, the preference for practical and commercial solutions to problems and, above all, to the devastating influence of Protestant evangelism in everyday lives.”

Like the councilman spouting in the corridor, New Albany’s most renowned practitioners of the anti-intellectual craft tend somewhat bizarrely to be registered as Democrats, although it is difficult to imagine any of them voting for their party’s standard bearer, Barack Obama, in 2008. As such, they’re little more than political poseurs, and with each passing day, we find better ways to sidestep their obstructionist defaults.

Does their destructive anti-intellectualism really matter?

It does, because it emits a catastrophic message to the community, mimicking Pink Floyd: “We don’t need no education — only ward heeling.”

It cynically condemns our children to the very same poisoned atmosphere of unaccountability and low common denominators that shaped New Albany’s malignant past and brought us to a state of apathetic degradation.

It furthers an atmosphere of congenital political underachievement. How many elected community “leaders” can you identify with support for the proposition that life’s difficulties are best confronted “with an intelligence of which no human should ever be ashamed,” as Dorfman phrases it.

Not many.

Rather, they persistently demand that we be ashamed, frightened and uncooperative. They denounce a pantheon of imaginary enemies, of shifty, phantom withholders of vital information, of smarty-pants book-learning engineers, of those who read, of those who write ... of anyone who can “do” as they haven’t ever done, and cannot ever do.

Hence the purely imaginary cabal of zoning officials and contractors, plotting by candlelight to pump sewage into area basements.

In the same year as Hofstadter’s treatise on anti-intellectualism, his essay entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was published in Harper’s Magazine. It is a compendium of American political paranoia, as directed against a cornucopia of enemies — free masonry, the international gold ring, the Illuminati, Catholics and Communists, among others.

Hofstadter offers that “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” behind which is a “paranoid style” of thought.

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Hofstadter died many years ago, and yet his words chillingly describe the prevailing New Albanian political “culture.”

Consider the incessant talk of malicious City Hall plots directed against selfless public servants on the council. Survey the chronic knee-jerking when these same public servants are asked for corroborating evidence to support their nonsensical conspiratorial claims. Chuckle at the recurring expressions of anti-intellectual rage when they’re presented with alternative, contemporary visions of the world and asked if they’ve heard of life outside the Open Air Museum.

Looking for the best place to begin rejecting the politics of anti-intellectualism and paranoia on the council, and for isolating their practitioners? It’s the council president’s chair — and the time for change is mercifully close at hand.