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Dark Ages resume

Charlie Pierce writing in Esquire:

Welcome to Idiot America

Let's take a tour, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn. James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically-elected president of Venezuela.

The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying that "an embryo is a person... We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the baby-back rib.

Pierce is a sportswriter for the Boston Globe, and he's also a frequent contestant on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, in case you're wondering where else you might have heard the name. He's really on a roll here. He talks about Intelligent Design (Dinosaurs on exhibit! Dinosaurs with English saddles!), but more than that he talks about the anti-intellectualism America has fallen into (far far deeper than it was in the 1950s, when Adlai Stevenson was ridiculed as a "pointy-headed intellectual" and lost two Presidential elections in part because of it). This anti-intellectualism has been overcome by the Gut feeling, of which there are three precepts:

1. Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2. Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3. Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

One last shot:

It is the ultimate standard of Idiot America. How does it play to Joe Six-Pack in the bar? At the end of August 2004, the Zogby people discovered that 57 percent of undecided voters would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry. Now, how many people with whom you've spent time drinking beer would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? Not only is this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it's not even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.

It's a wonderful piece.

(Link recommended by Adam Felber.)

Posted by Linkmeister at December 12, 2005 12:01 AM | TrackBack