Years ago, at a dinner party on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I found myself in a shouting match about whether it was fair to make fun of intellectuals. The person with whom I was arguing, herself the daughter of prominent scholars, said she was offended by the work of Woody Allen because of his mocking portrayal of educated, urban elites.

At the time, I was 25 and strenuously devoted to the cause of making my life resemble that of a Woody Allen character. (This was before he moved them to the Upper East Side.) Still, I couldn't see my dinner companion's grievance as anything but unintentional self-parody. Intellectuals, I argued, were made for poking fun at. Even I, a clueless suburban refugee who dreamed of rent-controlled apartments filled with house plants and volumes of Goethe, could see that.

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm beginning to think she might have had a point. As dumb as things were back then, it's fair to suggest today's culture is even dumber. Granted, the police aren't raiding highbrow cultural events and arresting anyone who uses a three-syllable word, but something uncannily similar is playing out, minute by minute, on television and the Internet. With political discourse reduced to screaming contests and actual news eclipsed by exclusive and shocking footage of celebrities without makeup, we've become not only impatient with but downright opposed to the kinds of ideas that can't be reduced to a line on a screen crawl or a two-sentence blog entry.

What's more, a lot of people who harbor an intolerance for complexity see it not as a character flaw but a cognitive virtue. That's because they've fallen into the trap of believing that complicated ideas ("complicated" now constituting anything that requires reading, watching or listening to in its entirety) are the purview of the "elite."

The effect of that trap has been on a continuous loop in recent days, following Barack Obama's ill-chosen remarks about bitter rural Americans clinging to guns and religion. The takeaway, of course, is that this sentiment proves once and for all that Obama is an elitist fatally out of touch with the average American. But in deference to my onetime dinner companion, let me ask this: Is he vulnerable to the out-of-touch charge because he is an elitist, or because he is usually (even if not in this case) comfortable with and in command of nuanced ideas? Is he bashable because he's a snob or because he's an intellectual?

Given that "intellectual" is now far too open to interpretation to mean much (William F. Buckley was considered an intellectual, but these days so is anyone who wears those hipster-nerd glasses), I'm tempted to leave that question to the old master, Woody Allen (though, let's be honest, he traded intellectuals for boring rich people a while ago). But even if Obama is not an intellectual in the classic sense, there's no doubt that he's absorbed the trappings of erudite rhetoric. He offers up ideas that don't lend themselves to sound bites but require some sustained attention. And according to the media and the political spin machine, that's proof he's snobby and out of touch.