Like every other parent in America, I was at the movie theater last weekend, kids in tow or rather, towed by kids to see “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” I had done due diligence, as good consumers should, reading several reviews in various newspapers. I was ready for the worst.

Those looking for a literal rendering of J.K. Rowling’s novel, advised the Washington Post, might enjoy the screen version. But “if it’s enchantment they are after, that’s quite another matter.”

The critic for The New York Times was even more dismissive. “The most highly awaited movie of the year has a dreary, literal-minded competence,” Elvis Mitchell wrote. “A lack of imagination pervades the movie because it so slavishly follows the book.”

Competent? Literal? These are the new synonyms for “yucky” in the Movie Reviewers’ Desktop Guide to Epithets. I warned my kids about the reviews.

They loved the movie anyway. Somehow, with an untrained eye, they managed to discern amid all that slavishness an enchantment that had eluded the professionals. On the drive home, my 10-year-old son had an epiphany that may forever change his life.

“If they don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said, “why do they get to write in the newspaper?”

Linkletter’s insight

As the famed media critic Art Linkletter once warned, kids do say the darnedest things. My son was referring to movie reviewers, but as he goes through life and his exposure to all kinds of media becomes more comprehensive, his disillusionment can only grow.

Last weekend he was introduced to an inescapable fact of our culture: the incorrigible dumbness of smart people.

Populists call them the elites; the elites call them or themselves the intelligentsia. Whatever the tag, they constitute that lucky class of journalists, critics, and academics who are paid to study, think about and comment on American life. And the world they think they see around them seems increasingly at variance with the one their audience lives in.

You may have noticed this, for example, in the coverage of the war on terrorism. Polls show an almost bottomless reservoir of patience on the part of the public for the zigs and zags of the war. Before our bombing campaign was a month old, however, the news commentary had taken on a tone of impatience bordering on fatalism.

“The war is not going well,” announced columnist Charles Krauthammer on Oct. 30. His Washington Post colleague Richard Cohen was more patient. He waited another week before informing his readers, “This war is behind schedule.”

“Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past,” wrote R.W. Apple on the front page of The New York Times Oct. 31, “the ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy.

“We spend $300 billion a year on planes and bombs and military marvels,” complained Maureen Dowd, with a slight stomp of her foot, in the New York Times on Nov. 4, “but still can’t faze Taliban warriors.”

A week later, Taliban warriors were deeply fazed. U.S. allies overran most of their strongholds. This undeniable success, not surprisingly, forced R.W. Apple to worry about a protracted guerrilla war, which might become yes a quagmire. “That made a lot of people think once more about Vietnam,” he wrote of the victories last week. (Do Apple’s friends ever stop thinking about Vietnam?)

Too pessimistic

I don’t mean to pick on R.W. Apple, one of the most widely respected well, actually, I do mean to pick on R.W. Apple. But he and his commentating colleagues are guilty only of habitual pessimism. Far worse is found among another class of professional smart people, America’s academics.

“Academe is the only sector of American society that is distinctly divided in its response” to Sept. 11, said a report released by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The anti-Americanism billowing from the nation’s faculty lounges should be old news by now, but even so, the examples cited in the report are impressive for their unvarying silliness.

“Whatever [terrorism’s] proximate cause,” said Barbara Foley, a widely published professor of English at Rutgers University, “its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy.”

The report reproduces more than 100 such comments from university campuses, where countless parents send their children every year and pay handsomely for the privilege. One can only hope that somewhere along the way their kids have learned the lesson other children learned this weekend from Harry Potter: Only smart people can be this dumb.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.