"An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike"
About this Quote
A sneer dressed up as a joke: Agnew’s line reduces “the intellectual” to a figure of practical incompetence, the guy so lost in abstractions he can’t manage a basic, physical task. The bike is doing a lot of work here. It’s ordinary, cheap, democratic, and faintly youthful; “parking” it is the kind of frictionless know-how that signals you belong in the everyday world. Fail at that, and you’re not just bookish, you’re unserious.
The intent is less observational than disciplinary. It warns audiences not to trust people whose authority comes from ideas rather than visible, hands-on competence. That framing is politically useful: it converts a disagreement over policy or power into a character flaw. If intellectuals can’t “park a bike,” why listen to them about war, the economy, race, or protest?
The subtext taps mid-century American anti-elitism and the era’s culture-war wiring: the expert, the professor, the journalist, the bureaucrat. Agnew, as Nixon’s attack dog, made a career out of turning media and campus dissent into a convenient enemy, portraying critique as effete contempt for “real Americans.” The punchline’s masculinity is also deliberate: “a man who doesn’t know” implies not only impracticality but a failure of manhood, a softening.
It works because it’s a clean, visual insult. You can picture the toppled bike. You can laugh without engaging the argument. That’s the point: it turns thinking into a kind of clumsiness, and clumsiness into disqualification.
The intent is less observational than disciplinary. It warns audiences not to trust people whose authority comes from ideas rather than visible, hands-on competence. That framing is politically useful: it converts a disagreement over policy or power into a character flaw. If intellectuals can’t “park a bike,” why listen to them about war, the economy, race, or protest?
The subtext taps mid-century American anti-elitism and the era’s culture-war wiring: the expert, the professor, the journalist, the bureaucrat. Agnew, as Nixon’s attack dog, made a career out of turning media and campus dissent into a convenient enemy, portraying critique as effete contempt for “real Americans.” The punchline’s masculinity is also deliberate: “a man who doesn’t know” implies not only impracticality but a failure of manhood, a softening.
It works because it’s a clean, visual insult. You can picture the toppled bike. You can laugh without engaging the argument. That’s the point: it turns thinking into a kind of clumsiness, and clumsiness into disqualification.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|
More Quotes by Spiro
Add to List
