How Stupid Can We Get - and Stay Free?

I've long since begun to wonder what it would take to impeach this President. I mean, he publicly repudiates his oath of office, says he won't obey the laws he signs into effect as he does so, and treats the Congress like they were dockworkers or farmers. The man has the chutzpah of - well, hell, he beats anything I've ever heard of.

How the hell he has gotten away, for instance, with the bald-faced lying necessary to get us into the Iraq morass is impossible to grasp. There is nobody, anywhere, in any forum, who could have gotten away with a "the dog ate my homework" story like that. Every other day, we're told how sixteen satellite passes a day over Iran are detecting what the Iranians have for breakfast, and how the Koreans are getting ready to fire a test missile, but the WMDs we were dead sure were in Iraq were a mistake. They must have been built in somebody's garage or bathtub. Out of old junk and household cleaners.

A better question, perhaps, is how stupid does the public have to have been to believe a story like the Bush Tale. And what does that kind of stupidity mean for the future?

The nation's sages, the media pundits write solecistic and illogical drivel. In our courts, argument and rulings are so clumsy, inarticulate, and devoid of the gravitas one once expected of lawyers as to become the butt of ribald humor. Public speeches and debate - "but," as Mark Twain once said in discussing idiots and congressmen, "I repeat myself;" we don't have debates anymore, just speeches - are vapidly sophomoric recitation of partisan litanies.

Maybe that's just my age. Once you've heard the same tired slogans and nostrums repeated by presidential campaign after campaign, it gets to be like having to endure yet another "Titanic" remake. Enough, already!

But the scariest part of it all is the yahoo mentality and barbaric yawping of the public, especially in matters of religion, politics, and public affairs. All but totally devoid of logical basis or validity, absolutely characterized by relentlessly continual invective and insult, the public discourse amounts to little more than an infantile shouting match, no one listening to what the other side is saying. Every logical fallacy known to man is trotted out, by persons so abysmally only self-aware and ignorant as to be proud of their Malaprops, solecisms, and non-sequiturs. Like Ann Coulter recently, most of these would-be David Lettermans and Jay Lenos attempt to prove the fact of things by arguing there is no proof to the contrary. There must be WMDs in Iraq - Cuba, too - because no has proved they AREN'T there. These red-neck rhetoricians prove THEIR point by proving - in their scheme of forensics - that YOU are wrong in yours.

Recently, in one of the dozens of debates I engaged in concerning the several conspiracies having to do with the World Trade Center, a woman seemingly desperately desirous of proving the U.S. government - the reader will remember how sycophantly loyal I am to our wondrously honorable and efficient federal government - actively responsible (mind you, absence of evidence proves that) for the several plane crashes on 9-11 (she doesn't believe there WERE any), argued that "the cover-up" proved her point. When I pointed out that cover-up would require the complicity of literally hundred of people, including police officers and fireman, journalists, thousands of spectators, and even judges, to say nothing of accounting for the airplanes, their passengers and crew, she fired back to accuse me of being and "agent provocateur," and complicit in the cover-up. She borrowed, I suspect, use of the term agent provocateur from another essay of mine on the same forum.

Neither was the woman alone. More, when I pointed out to others on the same internet forum that the biggest building ever demolished by controlled demolition - as the lady and her supporters insist must have occurred - was at 439 feet just one-third the height of just one of the twin towers, and that a Controlled Demolition, Incorporated's 12 person explosives-loading crew working on the Hudson Building took twenty four days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on columns on nine levels of the complex, using more than 36,000 ft of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electric delay elements in the implosion initiation system - that to create the 36 primary implosion sequence and another 216 micro-delays to keep down the detonation over-pressure from the 2,728 lb of explosives which would be detonated during the demolition, the conspiracy theorists exploded with scatological fury. I was an idiot. An evil, murderous, "neo-con" idiot.

In an effort at moderation and conciliation, I asked someone to explain how a crew as big as that required for controlled demolition of the Trade Center, installing more than six times as much implosion initiation system, would accomplish such a colossal feat without a single notice and report by witnesses in the aftermath of what occurred, I was, to quote one, "stupid." I didn't "know shit."

"Everyone knows," said another, "that George W. Bush is a liar." Why would he tell the truth about this> Well, I said, maybe because it was the truth, and it was to his advantage to tell it that way. I added that, speaking logically, even the demonstrated fact that someone was a liar didn't prove that he was lying this time. That, my antagonist spat, was ridiculous. I was a traitor. More, since I was an "apologist for the Bush Administration, and therefore complicit in what happened, I was a murderer.

On another website forum, a gentleman who professed atheism contemptuous of any and all religion, asseverated that all mention of god was without exception religion. It could not be a matter for scientific consideration. Science that sought to know how the universe originated was not science. When I had - with certain obvious stipulations - offered a logically incontrovertible proof of god (all such proofs are a matter of semantics: if by "god" one means the origin of things, and there either was or was not a beginning, then god is either the initiator, or the thing that has always been), he made what has become the classic repair to insult. I was a stupid SOB - I must be, because nobody with any intelligence whatever believes in god - so it was impossible that I was right. Since I must be wrong, there is no god.

Another guy wrote to say MY argument was "circular." When I said, no, in fact, it wasn't, and invited him to prove his contention, guess what? Yeah. I was a "moronic deist," and incapable of getting anything through my "thick head."

And so on, ad dreary infinitum.

Funny? Hell, no! This is damned serious. This nation, any nation, is a system - more or less, a closed one. Everything in it bears upon, has an effect upon, everything else. More, it is in many ways a chaotic system - meaning that it is characterized by great result from relatively tiny cause. Even were that not so, and witness the no longer debatable fact that a majority of our electorate is too stupid to do basic mathematics or use simple logic, the determinism of cause and effect related systems means that we may be in trouble potentially fatal for our nation. We, the United States of American, may die of stupidity.

Let's use an analogy, that of global warming (yeah, I know a great number of us doesn't believe that - remember the tabloid magazines and how popular they are?). In a relatively short time - considering the age of the planet and that of civilization - a relatively small part of the earth's population has succeeded in raising the temperature of the atmosphere enough to produce incontrovertible and measurable evidence of world-wide warming. Scientists warn that this will soon become catastrophic. Profligate and over-indulgence in the planet's fullness and bounty, about ten percent of the world's population may well have succeeded in destroying much of the life here - including man.

The deterministic system I speak of, of course, is the ecosystem. But so is the society of the United States a system, and NOTHING IN A DETERMINISTIC SYSTEM CAN BE CHANGED ALL BY ITSELF. Nothing! Like the human body's system, anything that effects one part or component - an ingested drug, for instance - MUST have "Side effects." That means that any ideology, like that of militant feminism - no matter how beneficial to some - must have result otherwise. When a pharmaceutical company proposes to begin sale of a medication, it makes - it is required by law, that is - extensive tests, in order to identify all of the effects of the substance. Wherever harmful result occurs, the drug is not marketed, or is used stringently and in extreme instances.

But what of a swift change in the daily behavior of people - hours of immersion, for instance in televised violence? How about the effect of an ideology, that of social change demanded by a militant societal group? How, for instance, did society test the effects of radical feminism? The one-parent (meaning mother) family? What will the result of gay "marriage" be? How about "nation-building" - like Iraq?

What has been, and what will been fifty years from now, the effect of what has been the relentless lessening of discipline - and its inevitable secondary effect on education - in bringing up children? How will the stupidity resulted from until now de-emphasized education affect the society and nation's future?

Ben Franklin - being asked what kind of government Constitutional Convention was creating - said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Two hundred nineteen years later, about one in four Americans (28 percent) are able to name more than one of the five fundamental freedoms granted to them by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Almost twice as many Americans (52 percent) can name at least two members of “The Simpsons” cartoon family. More than four in 10 Americans (41 percent) could name two of the three “American Idol” judges and one in four could name all three. That while just 8 percent of Americans could name at least three of their First Amendment freedoms (just for the record, that's Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Assembly, and the Freedom to Petition for Redress of Grievances).

One in five Americans (21 percent) agreed that the First Amendment granted them the right to own and raise pets. Another one in five thought that the right to drive an automobile is guaranteed by the First Amendment (remind yourself that the car wasn't invented for another 100 years).

Nonsense like that would be appalling enough, were it not for the fact that it explains better than anything else our languishing under the elected officials we have. How dumb can we get without losing our freedom? How long can a society endure, in a state so stultified and gullible that it accepts as news the lurid and pandering pap being spewed out by the media? While tens of thousands of persons - look it up, dammit - are subjected yearly to what is literally atrocity by federal and state government, the media sells - that, after all, is what it's all about in corporate "American" - Natalee Holloway disappearances and the like in order to cover for an elitist, absolutely corrupted government and its crimes.

In the Land of the Free, the fourth estate is charged with keeping watch. It is absolutely essential in a republic that the electorate know the truth about government. "Know." To know requires two things, information and the intellect to interpret it. It may be, therefore, that the two most critical of the corporately owned federal governments usurpations has been that of education and the press. Both have kept us from stupidity. And, to quote Thomas Jefferson"

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Now you know why the internet forums and the nightly news have me so alarmed.

* http://www.geocities.com/prisonmurder/ken_trentadue.html