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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
that in fact, it's Palin who's parodying them. She's a gimlet eyed political shark made of solid ambition, not somebody chosen for their talent or ability; and this wide-eyed "gee whillikers, God bless, I'm just a simple citizen with commomn sense" act is how she sees her base.
I believe the dumbing down of America is a calculated attempt by conservatives to allow them to lead the country without question or scrutiny from the American public. This was most eloquently stated by Tony Benn of the UK in an interview w/ Michael Moore (this can be found in the special scenes following the movie "Sicko"). To paraphrase, he said basically that in order to get the public to follow blindly and without question, keep them ignorant, poor, and frightened. This is basically the agenda the Republican Party has been following during the "reign" of Bush-Cheney. We now have a national debt that will be next to impossible to pay down without returning jobs and business to the USA, our schools are underfunded and our students the poorest educated in decades compared to other industrialized countries, and they have kept us in fear by bringing "terror" into every home and heart.
I'm afraid we're making slow progress here, but I will try again.
You were asked to provide some name(s), some culprit(s) who precipitated this Oswald Spengler-esque catastrophe, some person(s) as-yet-unknown, toward whom you might be willing to point and declare "j'accuse".
This is what you provided as your "proximate cause":
"Too many children, not enough grownups".
By 'grownups', I assume you refer to the generation of brave men and women who, returning from the living hell of World War II, came home and started families? Those grownups? You mean to tell us that having survived a decade of depression and the grim duty of putting down the Axis... they were simply too tired to discipline their own children?
This being -in your own estimation- a "mere matter of quantity over quality"... perhaps you would have advocated some limit on the number of children each family would've been allowed to produce? Chairman Mao would be proud.
Assuming, for the momentary sake of argument, that it's worthwhile to look behind this tissue of bullshit you attempt to draw across history... at the very least, at the very minimum, the adults "whose job it was to maintain order and enforce rules" are to blame, and NOT the children who had the galling temerity to be concieved, born and raised by them.
Name one of these supposedly negligent 'adults.' One.
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Some further questions for you:
You were asked to provide some name(s), some culprit(s) who precipitated this Oswald Spengler-esque catastrophe, some person(s) as-yet-unknown, toward whom you might be willing to point and declare "j'accuse".
This is what you provided as your "proximate cause":
"Too many children, not enough grownups".
By 'grownups', I assume you refer to the generation of brave men and women who, returning from the living hell of World War II, came home and started families? Those grownups? You mean to tell us that having survived a decade of depression and the grim duty of putting down the Axis... they were simply too tired to discipline their own children?
This being -in your own estimation- a "mere matter of quantity over quality"... perhaps you would have advocated some limit on the number of children each family would've been allowed to produce? Chairman Mao would be proud.
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There is an implied and assuredly unintended compliment in the request for specific causative agents for the collapse of the higher culture across the West in the last century. I am afraid I cannot venture a guess. It seems evident that whatever brought the roof down was a long while in the making, no sudden or accidental mishap. And it seems equally clear that the post-war boom and boomer generation served as the straw to break the camel's back. Beyond that I cannot say. One might go back to the French Revolution and Burke's eulogy on the age of chivalry. Somehow or another it always comes back to quantity for me: there are massively more common, ordinary, undistinguished and often defective people than otherwise - and it therefore seems inevitable that sooner or later the sheer force of numbers was bound to prevail. It was merely a matter of when and where and how, never of if or whether. The economist Joseph Schumpeter's prediction of the transformation of capitalism into socialism through the erosive and subversive influence of this vast class of intellectual proletarians has always seemed intuitively right to me.
Then again it could have all come about because of the rupture in the Great Chain of Being - which is much the same thing. People no longer know or accept their place in the order of things, rebel against superiors and authority, and fancy themselves the equals or superiors of the best who have ever lived. The commonest college student today views the greatest minds of the past with serene disdain - if, that is, he has even heard their names.
People on forums like this clearly view themselves as infinitely wiser than politicians and elected representatives they dislike. How often do we read posts from anonymous nobodies LOOKING DOWN on people who have surpassed them in every way? It is nothing for the merest clerk or perhaps high school student to presume and present themselves as wiser in world and national affairs than Presidents and entire Administrations! The is an absence of epistemic and moral modesty that, were it not as prevalent as it unfortunately is, could well be mistaken for insanity, i.e. delusional megalomania.
When one inquires the source(s) of such wisdom he is seldom vouchsafed a satisfactory answer. There is, of course, no such answer. Such people just KNOW that they are right- and that all who disagree are wrong/stupid/ignorant/evil. They aren't kidding, either. They really believe that.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
