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America, beautiful, but dumb
America is literally like no other country in the world.
"The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse." Susan Jacoby - Washington PostAmerica is extraordinarily original, therefore "exceptional", but not exactly like most Americans think. In fact "American Exceptionalism" is a doctrine which maintains that Americans, because of their innate "goodness", are destined to fulfill a special destiny.
Here is a sample of this mentality in a recent statement of Colin Powell's, which many see as an indirect endorsement of Barack Obama:
"I am going to be looking for the candidate that seems to me to be leading a party that is fully in sync with the candidate and a party that will also reflect America's goodness and America's vision."Now there any number of positive adjectives that I could apply to "my fellow Americans": energetic, creative, hard working, ingenious, enthusiastic, etcetera, but "good"?
General Powell is talking about a people who enslaved his ancestors, ethnically cleansed the Native-Americans, dropped atomic bombs on the helpless civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and uselessly killed about a million Vietnamese in a historically short space of time. Good? Certainly, any lucid historian would have to say about America what the British used to say about certain ladies, "she's no better than she ought to be".
So, I am not "proud" to be an American, simply, I AM an American. I love America because I love myself, not vice versa. I accept and cherish her gifts to me and assume her karma reverently. America is my idiosyncrasy, my mother tongue and a sortilege of skandas to schlep though the samsara. Never, in my whole life, often surrounded by people who detest what the United States represents, have I ever said -- with that smile of a fox eating excrement off a wire brush -- that I am a Canadian... In the words of a great American, "I yam what I yam". I just don't want to live there, f'ya knowwhaddahmean.
After I lived away from America some time, I began to have enough distance to "see oursels as ithers see us" and realize how unique, eccentric, idiosyncratic and even a bit sinister America really is. However, like Susan Jacoby, whose text I quote today, lately I have begun to notice that America has passed originality to become simply weird. A country that produced Emerson, William James, Walt Whitman, Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison has become a universal byword for stupidity.
'Twasn't always so. Jacoby writes:
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged "Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin." This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made.If we go farther back we can find masses of citizens, many frontiersmen, who way back in 1858 were able to follow the complex arguments of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. So obviously this isn't something genetic. Americans are being deliberately turned into idiots, because only idiots would act as America does today. What has happened? Who in America wants Americans to be so stupid? Why?
It is far beyond my modest abilities to forge a truly American, grand-paranoid-conspiracy theory of all of this. But I would humbly direct the attention of those sufficiently endowed in these matters to explore the confluence of interests between America's over bloated military spending, its suicidally self-defeating foreign policy and the enormous media conglomerates: news-sports-Hollywood, that create America's mental wallpaper, the texture of its stupidity. The answer is certainly there.
David Seaton
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Comments (4)
Excellent post, David. I hadn't heard of Jacoby before she appeared on last week's Bill Moyer's Journal. I was impressed. Here's how Moyers introduced her:
(I think you can get video of the entire Jacoby interview here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html and a text transcript is here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02152008/transcript4.html )
Here's what Jacoby said about how the new President might approach the healthcare issue:
In other words, you wouldn't say to people, "You're a dope." You would say, "We have got to do better in-- about learning the things we need to know to make sound public policy." We can't learn the things we need to know from five-second sound bite commercials. We can't learn the things that we need to know from a quick hit on the Internet to see the latest person making a fool of themself on YouTube. We can only learn the things we need to know from talking to each other, from books. And we all need to do a lot more of that.
You know, what I don't see on the campaign trail-- if universal healthcare were one of my priorities as a candidate, first thing I'd be doing, I'd be having sessions all over the country with three groups of people, nurses, doctors, and patients. You don't need to know what the insurance industry thinks. Because you know what they think. They're going to oppose anything that they think will place any limits on medical spending and their ability to charge you higher health insurance premiums. But I'd be sitting down in unscripted sessions with people so that when-- if I was elected I could take that knowledge with me into the White House. So I could get my message across before Harry and Louise. That's what being an educator means.
And I think a candidate could say that to people. Not, "You're dopes." But, "We all need to know a lot more than we know." We've become satisfied with too little. We've become satisfied with the lowest common denominator.
I just hope that our Democratic candidates have either read Jacoby's book, which I plan to do myself, or at least saw the Moyers' interview.
(I've attempted to use HTML formatting, realizing that blockquotes only work for one paragraph at a time. I fear what may appear in my post will be a mess, as I really have little experience with HTML, and may get it wrong. If it comes out goofy, my apologies. I miss the rich text editor of the old TPM Cafe.)
February 19, 2008 1:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the link.
I'm afraid that things will get a lot worse before they get any better. There is a Spanish saying, "no hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver", there is no blinder man then he who doesn't want to see.
February 19, 2008 1:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
David,
Thanks for this post. I remember watching Ken Burns Civil War epic and listening to the letters home from these conscripts, these privates, farm boys and such. They didn't just write like Walt Whitman (they did), but they also wrote in very thoughtful ways. Very impressive kids. (I'm still very envious of their abilities!)
They thought about what was going on the paper. No cliches or bumper sticker slogans (not that there were any bumbers upon which to stick a slogan back then...but you know what I mean).
Anyway... oh for an army of Susan Jacobys! If you don't already, check out Free Inquiry. Great mag.
Thanks again.
February 19, 2008 2:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like the post and it goes quite well with NC Steve's reader's post as well. I think your points about appealing to the lowest common denominator are solid in contemporary times. It is interesting how the five-second sound bite appeals to so many. Maybe it makes people feel inclusive in today's current events in ways that they would never have been able to back in the day. For example when looking at news sites there will always be a section on entertainment and sports. Most of the entertainment sections read like gossip columns with a feel good story randomly placed. The sports stories are not much different trying to cover any conceivable angle despite the minutia of its impact on the overall success or failure of the teams. We focus on complicated issues like stem-cell research when most of us know very little about how the science came to be and what impact it is having in various industry. We talk about global warming but provide very little discourse over the specific influence it has on agriculture, water policy, interstate commerce policy etc. To me it all comes back to one thing, the media is not in the business to inform but is in the business sell. And unfortunately no matter which way you slice it, I believe there are more uninformed modestly intelligent people who will consume this and thus make up the base of the media's business.(I sure know that there are smarter people than me out there who also by the media, so maybe smarts has nothing to do with it)
February 21, 2008 2:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
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