March 20, 2012,
10:55 a.m
Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no
use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman
did
in the
Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s
most valuable
resources. Sure, they are, but
do
we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of
a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt
unable to tell truth from bullshit.
An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy
requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the
various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians
and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed,
and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily
for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and
widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters,
there’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and
deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in
this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and
for
business.
It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are
today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can
tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At
first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that
the nice and eager young people
enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of
the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing,
has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little
literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical
information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written,
including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.
Even regional history has gotten a short shrift.
Students who come from old New England mill towns, as I have
discovered, have never been told about the famous strikes in their communities
in which workers were shot in cold blood and the perpetrators got away
scot-free. I wasn’t surprised that their high schools were wary of bringing up
the subject, but it astonished me that their parents and grandparents, and
whoever else they came in contact with while they were growing up, never
mentioned these examples of gross injustice. Either their families never talked
about the past, or their children were not paying attention when they did.
Whatever it was, one is confronted with the problem of how to remedy their vast
ignorance about things they should have already been familiar with as the
generations of students before them were.
If this lack of knowledge is the result of the years of dumbing down of high
school curriculum and of families that don’t talk to their children about the
past, there’s another more pernicious kind of ignorance we confront today. It
is the
product of years of ideological and political polarization
and the deliberate effort by the most fanatical and intolerant parties in that
conflict to manufacture more ignorance by lying about many aspects of our
history and even our recent past. I recall being stunned some years back when I
read that a majority of Americans told pollsters that Saddam Hussein was behind
September 11 terrorist attacks. It struck me as a propaganda feat unsurpassed
by the worst authoritarian regimes of the past—many of which had to resort to
labor camps and firing squads to force their people to believe some untruth,
without comparable success.
No doubt, the Internet and cable television have allowed various political
and corporate interests to spread disinformation on a scale that was not
possible before, but to have it believed requires a badly educated population
unaccustomed to verifying things they are being told. Where else on earth would
a president who rescued big banks from bankruptcy with taxpayers’ money and
allowed the rest of us to lose $12 trillion in investment, retirement, and home
values be called a socialist?
In the past, if someone knew nothing and talked nonsense, no one paid any
attention to him. No more. Now such people are courted and flattered by
conservative politicians and ideologues as “Real Americans” defending their
country against big government and educated liberal elites. The press
interviews them and reports their opinions seriously without pointing out the
imbecility of what they believe. The hucksters, who manipulate them for the
powerful financial interests, know that they can be made to believe anything,
because, to the ignorant and the bigoted, lies always sound better than truth:
Christians are persecuted in this country.
The government is coming to get your guns.
Obama is a Muslim.
Global Warming is a hoax.
The president is forcing open homosexuality on the military.
Schools push a left-wing agenda.
Social Security is an entitlement, no different from welfare.
Obama hates white people.
The life on earth is 10,000 years old and so is the universe.
The safety net contributes to poverty.
The government is taking money from you and giving it to sex-crazed college
women to pay for their birth control.
One could easily list many more such commonplace delusions believed by
Americans. They are kept in circulation by hundreds of right-wing political and
religious media outlets whose function is to fabricate an alternate reality for
their viewers and their listeners. “Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of
historical forces,” Sidney Hook said once. No doubt. What we have in this
country is the rebellion of dull minds against the intellect. That’s why they
love politicians who rail against teachers indoctrinating children against
their parents’ values and resent the ones who show ability to think seriously
and independently. Despite their bravado, these fools can always be counted on
to vote against their self-interest. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is why
millions are being spent to keep my fellow citizens ignorant.
