Smart Terror Management 101

Needless to say, the government’s reaction to the failed terror attack has been a case study in quintessential Smart Personism:

1. Regardless of what happened exactly, assert unabashedly and brazenly and without factual basis that you did everything right.
2. Use the sweeping, unaccountable, arrogant power you’ve Smartened yourself into to disrupt and insert yourself into the lives of all those normal, mostly-not-Smart People who don’t really matter anyway.
3. Don’t waste your breath trying to justify (2) on any sort of logical grounds. Let all complaints and debate fall on deaf (but Smart) ears. Remember: you’re Smart, so whatever you came up with is axiomatically Smart, no matter how dumb-ass it is, and anyone who criticizes you is automatically being Dumb, and probably a racist who didn’t go to as good a college as you. And even if, in the end, what you come up with turns out to be not so smart after all, you’ll just fix it later. Indeed, they’ll probably need to keep you around for even longer and for more money just to fix it later. So much the better!
4. Finally, go around insisting that (1)-(3) is how things are always supposed to work in a Smart world. Bad stuff happens to little people (or is barely avoided), but you, a Smart Person, Smartly ‘manage’ the aftermath in ever-more intrusive ways. That’s why you get paid the big bucks. That’s how things are supposed to be and it is wrong and Dumb of anyone to suggest otherwise.

UPDATE: The above response is nothing more than what was instilled in Smart People from their childhood, of course. They were told they were ‘gifted’, so nothing they did could be wrong, not really. The major skills they learned – grade-grubbing, asking for ‘extra credit’ opportunities, creating and padding their college applications – mostly revolved around arrogantly citing their own supposed accomplishments. And just as their adolescence taught them that the world owed them things – ‘gifted’ classes, a spot in an elite college, etc. – they see no reason this shouldn’t continue. So if disrupting the hell out of the rest of the country for no good reason is what it takes to cover their asses and hide the fact that they have no real-world solutions to the problem, then so be it.