The past decade, which allowed the Bush Administration, American corporations and the great financial giants to turn the country into a dispeptic ulcer, which was mostly Bush and some Obama administered, has left us in a slump. It has taken so much energy to try and turn things around that we wonder if we can summon up more just to keep going.
I am amazed that so many people can protest the absolute need to control the economy by first bringing the rapidly increasing costs of health care under control while realizing that it is a common right for all of us and not merely a profit source for the greedy insurance ogres. And I mean that potentially sick people are pointing guns at their own heads with the encouragement of the Dick Armeys and Glenn Becks whose actual goals are financial returns from industry or big TV ratings.
When I ran the post yesterday about the educational poll of Oklahoma High School students, and thought about how many of them would fail the basic citizenship exam given to immigrants becoming Americans, it made me look around the blogs, especially the more right-leaning blogs, to see if anyone on the other side was concerned with the massive change in national intelligence that was occurring. I didn’t find much, although there was a rather heavy reliance on an upper class versus lower class standard that was forcefully being promoted (and I was very upset with the amount of it which centered on the kind of racial epithets I haven’t heard since the late fifties and early sixties.)
And I looked at the “Tea Party” events as pushed by Fox News and the several organizations 
put together by the same rich folk who tried (and actually succeeded) in “Swift Boating”, that is Destroying, John Kerry’s service contribution to the country in Viet Nam, and found them reinforcing the educational plummet of average Americans. It is obviously too easy to make people work against their own best interests… and extremely difficult to turn them around once they are trapped in all the brouhaha.
I am hoping that Obama’s cross network push on the Sunday Morning News Shows (even on Fox) will be the start of a potential turn around… but I also know they will not focus on what’s good for America when they can focus on Jimmy Carter bringing up the Race Issue as the major controversy, which it is not… definitely not. Television news tracks to the most dramatic crap, whether actually important or not, because it brings in viewers for corporate sponsors (and on the Sunday Morning shows, so many of these sponsors are Insurance or Financial players, or big industry types like ADM or Northrup-Grumman.) In a twelve or fifteen minute appearance, Obama will lose six minutes on this garbage without even blinking. Most likely, we will be right where we started when the day is through.
What is amazing is how influenced people will be by the news media’s inability to handle real issues while pushing garbage. Pew Research notes in a recent poll that the media is headed more towards inaccuracy and unfairness as seen by citizens who are swayed by their broadcasts:
Does this mean people KNOW they are being pressed by inaccurate news as they are MANIPULATED by it? And does it matter?
I have been signing more and more petitions to get Congress to move in the direction I thought, after the 2008 elections, they were going to move anyway. Many I have put on this blog and encouraged readers to respond to as well. Has it made a difference? I don’t think so, but I remain hopeful.
The 2010 elections are going to be the results indicator of all of this. We see the Congressional competition going on now with tremendous effort by the right to regain a foothold no matter what they say or do. One would hope that wisdom might prevail. In reality, we will continue to fear what is coming and think about the possibility of ducking it all and moving to Canada.
Couple of decades ago, I was playing Hearts with some lady friends. We were all cold sober and yet one after another we made really dumb mistakes that were obvious to the whole group. Finally, one of them said, “I guess someone’s aimed the Stupid Beam at this house,” and I said, “But, if we all got stupider, how would we know?” We all laughed but it became a serious discussion…
The woman in the photo above doesn’t know how to spell “official.” Maybe she’s under-educated or possibly brain-damaged or she just made a mistake in the heat of her passionate sign painting. But, while the paint was drying, she didn’t notice and no one in her household told her she had misspelled it. One would assume that if she knew she would have had time to make another sign.
Did she show off her sign to her friends before going to the rally? Was everyone too embarrassed to tell her she’d made a mistake? Or did they simply not know any better than she did? On her way to the rally and once she had arrived, did no one point out her error?
Some rude stranger must have blurted out, “Hey, you left out an I,” and laughed.
Did she reply, petulantly, “I don’t care! It doesn’t matter!”?
Did she really think, it doesn’t matter if I look ignorant? Or did she make it all the way from home surrounded by people as ignorant as she is? If we all got stupider, how would we know?!
a couple of things: first “the past decade”, is not responsible for “allowing” anything; WE ARE.
second, the crisis we’re now in the middle of has roots going back much farther– a least to the Reagan administration where the whole nonsensical notion of the magical and numerous benefits of an “unfettered, unregulated, unplanned Free Market system” found its Hollywood-trained front man, and numerous idiotic supporters in congress.
it’s been downhill ever since, culminating in the current crisis.
The “turn-around” is going to take generations to have effect. And even then, it won’t seriously begin before U.S. society resembles a smoking shambles. So, in some sense, (and fortunately!) it couldn’t be called a “turn-around”. The last thing the world needs is for the U.S. to “go back to the way they were ‘in the good old days.’ ”
Now I grant that, from the perspective of a typical resident of the U.S., such a prospect is unwelcome. But from the perspective of 94% or more of the rest of the world’s billions of people–who have suffered terribly from the U.S.-culture-domination which has characterized much of the past hundred years– it would be seen as a welcome change from “business as usual”.
If asked,
“Which, in your opinion, would be better:
a) the continued political, cultural and economic hegemony of U.S. with its attendant suffering around the world,
or,
b) the more or less sudden and complete disappearance of the people, government and culture of the United States as we know them today?”
what do you suppose the average man or woman on the street (outside of the U.S.) would reply? In my own opinion, this is what Americans, in another of their endless idiotic catch-phrases, would call a “no-brainer”. Obviously, it would be better for the rest of the world if somehow the U.S. government and its society just vanished, Poof!, gone! No more!
The irony may be that this could just be the result of the now-current (and unprecedented?) stupidity so rampant in the U.S. So, though it’s counter-intuitive for many of you to do so, I recommend that you turn your lens around and look through it the other way. The accelerating self-destruction of U.S. society is, from the point of view of the welfare of the vast majority of the planet’s population, not just a “good thing”, it’s their very salvation, if it happens soon enough.
my nominee for “Best Book of the Year” or, better still, the Decade:
In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong by Amin Maalouf.
link: http://www.amazon.com/Name-Identity-Violence-Need-Belong/dp/0142002577/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=book
s&qid=1253540604&sr=1-1
In a world gone ’tilt’, this book will place much of the seeming chaotic madness in a welcome and clarifying context.
You may understand better, for example, the root commonalities (which are very important) which underlie both Serb-Croat ethnic violence and the widespread scourge of violent clashes between rival-teams’ fans and much, much more of interest to us in our times.