Hey Chuck –
Both of your recent forwards read like companion pieces. The New Yorker column shows us how nuts we’ve become, and the Houston Chronicle piece suggests a way—albeit a dangerous way– to sort us all out (I mean, Palin could win, then we’d all have to move to a commune in Norway).
Both are terrific reads. The Surowiecki piece is terrifyingly accurate, though I think he’s a bit too forgiving of our countrymen. “The anger is understandable,” he says, but what I find hard to understand is Americans’ refusal to invest even the least bit of intellectual effort to go past the soundbites and slogans to get a better fix on what’s really going on. I can’t remember who said this, but his perfect answer to “I’m not really into politics ” was, “Oh yeah? Well, politics is really into you, my friend.”
No wonder we don’t make sense; we don’t have any. There is a long list of things pundits tend to blame for “The Dumbing Down of America”–TV, bad schools, busy schedules, blah, blah–but the real culprit here is a populace that is content to have reduced its political outlook to three categories: “Things That Save me Money,” “Things That Piss Me Off” and “Things I Don’t Understand”–with the third category being the dominant influence on the first two. That’s why Tea Party types can call Obama a Nazi and a communist, and not get laughed out of the room.
However, there was an encouraging turn in the mid-2000s (for a discouragingly short period) when people became politicized during Bush’s reign. He had scared the hell out of them. They began to look up terms like “fascism” and “unitary executive.” Friends who had never had a political thought in their lives began emailing me with their takes on the latest outrages of Bush and crew. Sadly, many of these political tyros had zero grounding in modern American or world history so they were easy pickings for lunatic, politics-as-entertainment theories, like Bush planned 9/11, etc. Their enthusiasm continued all the way up to Obama’s election, but then sort of petered out when, I suppose, the next season of American Idol began. But other political novitiates really began to do their homework, making a real effort to wade through the crap to find out what was actually going on. I still get email from them–sensible, thoughtful stuff.
There has always been a trace of anti-intellectualism flowing through our American veins, which I suppose began during our revolution against the sesquipedalian, be-wigged, English elite. But, today, dumb seems to have grown into a movement, or at least an important part of what Surowiecki calls “the new populism.”
Though education does require effort, it is also naturally rewarding. Evolution has hardwired us to fill our brains with new stuff– unless something gets in the way, like defeatism, hopelessness and good, old apathy. A documentary called “The American Ruling Class” suggests much of that hopelessness and defeatism felt by so many “average American Joes” is the result of a concerted effort by the American oligarchy to regain control of the nation from the grassroots movements of the 60s. I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but so many of this film’s premises–from the successful corporate attack on organized labor in the private sector, to the continuing, destructive status of corporations-as-citizens are convincing enough to make me believe that a lot of the mess we find ourselves wallowing in is no accident.
I better go before this letter gets long.
Too late,
RB
Russ Buchanan 