I'd lead the revolution, but I just got this hammock...

I'm going to alienate a lot of people right from the get-go with this one.

I am an intelligent person. Perhaps I have a one dimensional personality, but everyone I ever knew in school knows, or at least makes a big deal of introducing me, as a "genius." I'm good at math, science and am at least above averagely well-read. Being that being "the smart guy" has defined or at least colored me to most of the people I've ever known I've put some thought into intelligence in general over the years. Some disturbing developments I've noticed in the area are as follows.

Larry the Cable Guy.
There's nothing wrong with dumb culture. People have always made stupid lowbrow garbage. The difference was that it used to be dumb people enjoyed dumb shit because they were too dumb to discriminate. More and more recently it seems that ignorance, if not outright stupidity, has become not only acceptable, but preferable to the alternatives. People now more than ever seem to celebrate idiocy, seek it out and emulate it as often as possible.
In one sense its understandable. The people I find most enamored of this are what used to be called "lower class" before making someone sad became the worst thing you could do. Everyone's always assumed they're dumb hicks anyway, so laughing at Jeff Foxworthy may just be their reclaimed "nigger." And since the Republican party's spent the last thirty years describing them as the "Real Americans" some of the less self aware middle class self servingly identify with them as well.
The problem is that while the meaning of a word can change depending on its use, stupid is always stupid. And stupid is as stupid does. Most people aren't as stupid as Larry pretends to be, it's only done to be funny, and we're all in on the joke, but doing anything enough makes it a habit. Once stupidity becomes the default, it doesn't matter if its done ironically or not. It doesn't matter what you think, or what you'd like to be, it's what you do that determines what you are. A coward who's forced into doing something heroic is still a hero, and a genius who acts like a mouth breather is just taking up space. Larry the Cable Guy, and others like Limbaugh and Hannity, who espouse an unthinking simplistic model of life are in a very real way making people into morons. These people are the equivalent of lead poisoning.

Epic Movie
Of course, not all people want to present a front of this sort to the world, and do attempt to better themselves. The problem, as I've profanely and digressively touched on, is that one trap to fall into is to keep learning the same thing over and over.
People like to feel like smart, and nothing makes you feel more like a know it all than to listen to someone explain something you already know. Thus we get travel shows that talk only about the most stereotypical, widely known facts of the country, authors like Dan Brown who take semi-obscure bits of theology, make horrible fiction and somehow imbue them for the credulous with an air of "scholarship," or a media echo chamber that endlessly repeats the latest easily digested soundbite or scandal while tons of real, extremely unimportant but boring news goes by unnoticed and undiscussed. It's a horrible rut to get into but a very easy one, as you're never caught out in cocktail party conversation, as everyone knows the same eight facts about any concievable subject. You're always ready with a "You know I heard that, and did you also know..."
I recognize that everyone must learn basic facts at least one time in their lives, and that I'm getting dangerously close to the doucheyness of declaring this or that type of entertainment "for idiots." It does however genuinely seem to me that people are made uncomfortable by venturing a sincere, original, honest opinion that has not previously been vetted by one of the only two legitimate ideologies in the country. Remember the next deep thought that comes into your head, be it about love, human relationships, art, politics, anything, and voice it to anyone you know, in any setting you deem most appropriate. How close of a friend would you have to go to to not get a tired marijuana joke as a response?

A Beautiful Mind
To be honest, the facet our culture's approach to intelligence that most disturbs me is not the chucklehead watching the Man Show and reading Maxim because that's what he thinks guys are supposed to do. Nor is it the blanding out of the middle class, which I suspect is just part of human nature. It's the way people, even - especially - other intelligent people look on IQ intellectualism, even learning, with a kind of holy terror. There's something intrinsically special about someone who is smarter than you, that neither you, nor any normal mortal, could ever hope to attain. Better then to stand reverently in awe a respectful distance away, carrying any utterances down the mountain for the edification of the masses.
It generally works like this, an intelligent, art-brain kind of person (I've always been bad at right/left, and I don't feel like googling it) reads some popscience book about quantum physics or string theory (It's almost always those) or conversely, a math-brain type person takes a philosophy or creative writing class and then goes on and on to their friends in the respective field how they'd never be able to get their head around that stuff.
Of course the only reason their friend got their head around it in the first place was tons of hard work, touched off by more tons of enthusiasm. As Americans that view is anathema of course, we prefer our heroes to be prodigies. Takes the onus off of us, if we were meant to be good at math wouldn't we have figured out calculus in our cribs, or if art, shouldn't we have scrawled the Last Supper on our nursery school walls? The most illustrative example I can think of is Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon plays a twenty something generalist autodidact who shits the answers to problems in fields from math, to biology, to colonial American history that have stumped professors who have made that field their life's work. Because that's what smart people are like right? They just know the answers? Regardless of the question?
It's not. No matter how intelligent someone is, all that means is that they are good at learning. We all start a blank slate, and some people are quicker at filling it in than others, but they still need to put in the work. Yes, Mozart wrote his first symphony at four, but does anyone listen to it? Someone who spends his life getting the shit beat out of him by foster parents or hanging out with a gang of clods from Southie isn't going to be able to argue precedent in his own trial. He'll probably come up with a really clever way to shank someone and get away with it when he's in prison, but that's it.
Besides the unrealism, the problem with this view is that it paints him, and intelligence, as a superhuman, and thus, unatainable. At twenty he knows more than it's likely possible to even learn in a lifetime. The equivalent would be Donnie Wahlberg walking onto the Link and pulling the goalposts up with his bare hands.
This is a horrible metaphor, but I can't think of any more fitting: The mind is a muscle. I will never be an Olympic marathoner, but there are studs I ran with in high school and college who burnt out, quit, and whom my mediocre ass would now run circles around. This means I am now a better runner than them. In the same way, IQ is is the potential to learn, just as talent is the potential for athletic greatness. What matters is how much of that potential is realized that depends on how often and consistently one works at realizing it.
Knowledge is not conferred innately by one's genes, but by study. I don't mean sitting with a book in the library study, although obviously that is one way. I mean keeping your eyes open and looking around you. Every day, you are presented with hundreds of opportunities to better yourself. Have one of those conversations I was talking about. Read a challenging book, or watch a difficult movie. If you have the option, try a few classes in the subject you kinda sorta wish you had a handle on. If you dislike your job or beak up with a girl/boyfriend, think about why, and what that says about you, and people in general. If you get lost, instead of turning around, point yourself in the general direction you want to go and find a new way there. Fuck sake, just watch the traffic lights and try to figure out the timing, save yourself a couple minutes on the commute every day.
The ranks of people descending into sub-mongoloid levels of outward intelligence wouldn't be so alarming to me if it seemed as though there was a sizeable population of people running in the opposite direction the way we chase after the opposite sex, or a career, or any of the more minor obsessions that fill everyone's lives. Math isn't hard, nor is philosophy, writing, art, or whatever type of intellectual endeavor that you "have tons of respect for" but "just don't get." You just haven't really tried. I know I haven't.