Letters to the Editor
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So what else is new?
People are bone stupid now in sizable numbers and not just ignorant yahoos but fundamentally stupid half wits who are barely aware in some less than simian manner. How come Howie Mandel is the smartest show on broadcast television for that time slot. How can one explain the candidates for the presidential election without noting that there is no intelligence or thought involved in this whatsoever?
People are not only stupid, but they are proud and belligerent about it as well. If they had some dignity, they would pretend that they were smart but even that simple concept eludes them.
People are just so simple minded - what happened?
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"both sides"??
In my neck of the woods I hear nothing from people to suggest that they are being swayed by ideologues from "both sides". I hear only one side echoing over and over: the Right. Single payer health care is socialism. Dems are out to get our guns and our bibles. Gays must not marry. Social Security should be privatized. This from people who don't have good jobs or decent health care and who will depend heavily on Social Security as it stands; in other words, those who normally would be the constituency of the Left, not of the Right.
I realize that many may wish to appear neutral and even-handed by using the "both sides" canard. But it's patently ridiculous to suggest that the Left has any serious following in this country. Just cruise through the talk radio shows on you AM band for confirmation.
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Miller is right: the problem isn't "can't" but "won't."
Case in point: when the Baghdad museum was looted, a lot of very well educated people, the sort who probably write checks to art museums and go to see art exhibitions, sneered at those of us who were shocked by the event, claiming that we were being ridiculously sentimental and making much of a minor incident. Worse, we were elitists who prized effete things like art over the Freedom of the Iraqi People who had been Liberated from Tyranny! When it turned out that the initial estimates of the losses were too high, and that "only" a few thousand objects had been stolen or destroyed, as opposed to 170,000, they trumpeted it as proof that nothing that serious had happened. Roger Kimball, a conservative pundit for the WSJ who also fancies himself a great defender of the arts claimed that the whole story was false; that the objects had been removed from the curators before the war began, and that nothing important was taken. He has yet to apologize for that mistake, despite the fact that Matthew Bogdanos's article and book about the looting provide detailed and accurate information. But his contempt for those of us who cared about the wholesale trashing of Iraqi heritage didn't prevent him from writing a book called "The Rape of the Masters," in which he purports to "rescue" the great works of western art from the defiling clutches of politically correct art historians who interpret them in different ways than he does. This man claims to be an art historian, but can't or won't educate himself about one of the worst and most destructive art thefts of all time.
Kimball is an educated man. So is Camille Paglia, though you'd never guess it from her incoherent maunderings on this site once a month. And as predictably as the sunrise, she always takes a snide swipe at "hysterics" who promote "exaggerated" fears about global warming. Never once has she presented a shred of evidence to counter the scientific findings of climatologists that human pollution is releasing too much CO2 into the atmosphere. Never does she address the very real impact of rising sea levels and melting permafrost. All she can come up with in the way of an argument is that she remembers that in her college geology class, she learned that there have been other climate fluctuations in the past, and has concluded on the basis of the great expertise she acquired in Geo 101 that this climate change is natural like the others, and besides, she doesn't like Al Gore because he does not live up to her own thoroughly bizarre notions of "masculinity." It's all mushed up in her mind somehow with gender and patriarchy and of course the lovely prepubescent fun of being contrary.
Does this matter? Well, we all know what happened when the civilized and well-educated people of Germany and Austria permitted themselves to believe an irrational man who told them what they wanted to hear about their own racial glory and right to rule the world. Yes, willful irrationality can lead to terrible consequences.
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seems to me to be a class thing...
on the one hand, we have articles like this one, along the lines of: "we are getting dumber". on the other hand we have many articles describing how tough admission is to the top universities, how pressured kids are to achieve early etc and so on.
and then my own experience in San Francisco is that there are many super-smart, super-talented young people around.
my guess is that america is bifurcated in education along economic lines. a small percentage is very well educated, focussed and capable, and a growing much larger percentage is undereducated, with diffuse attention and limited mental training and therefore limited problem solving abilities.
the top percentage run companies, design stuff, play the markets, take advantage of the global expansion and get more wealthy. the mass consumes. it's easier to sell flat screens if the mass doesn't read, no? easier to sell advertising to a non-literate, uncritical audience. cheap, profitable TV like the reality crap sells easier to an audience that's never been forced to wonder about what constitutes an effective narrative (insert your own example here).
the competition to get into, and remain in the "ruling class" (shall we call it), is fierce and getting fiercer. for good reason. those super-moms have a point - they want their kids driving the system when they are older (venture capital, software, international investment!), not being driven by it.
capitalism, for all its faults, ruthlessly optimizes. if we only need 5% of the population to be well educated to drive economic growth, then that's what we're gonna get. corrections like the current mortgage crisis are part of the growth process - the "ruling class" got too greedy sticking ridiculous products on the dummies (let's not be afraid of being judgmental: a poor education sets you up beautifully for a teaser-rate loan - if you don't like to read, you are unlikely to understand that your payment is going to pop 50% or more after 12 months). for a while, the system resets until a new means of optimizing profits from the consumer shows up, and off we go again.
America isn't closing the book on intelligence - it's figuring out how to have "intelligence" distributed most effectively (that is, very unevenly) so that the economic system operates as profitably and efficiently as possible.
in case it's in doubt: I don't support this process. I believe in government intervention to support the lives of the majority. It breaks my heart that our local state school in san francisco, in an area containing some of the most expensive real estate in the world, cant afford a music teacher and is about to lose the part-time sports teacher. reason: nobody with money around here goes to the local state school - they go to privates, where they are already being groomed, at the age of seven and eight, to join the top tier, the drivers, the unofficial ruling class...
J