Face It, "America," You're Too Stupid to Be a Democracy - or Rule the World.

That, in case you're interested, is William Butler Hickok - "Wild Bill." Bill was a gunfighter, the real kind - and the best. Our "Go for you gun" (or was it "Bring it on"?) president, on the other hand, is a wannabe. With nuclear bullets in his six-shooters.

Everyone who knows me knows, too, that I have in my effort to understand things sought to identify microcosms by which to understand and predict the behavior of the macrocosm to which it must relate. Take, for instance, my own life and routine as it relates to the society wherein I live.

This morning as is my custom, I took my cup of coffee to the television, where I always first check to see if it’s safe to go outside. What has the whorehouse on the Potomac, for instance, been up to? How many more of our young people have this idol-worshipping nation and its military industrial complex Toltecs thrown down the Chichen Itza sacrificial well of Iraq? What’s the latest outrage perpetrated by corporate “America” against the environment and atmosphere? That sort of thing.

Well, to begin, something I’ve been expecting happened. It should have occurred to anyone who watches even as little TV as I do that sooner or later the mathematical odds against ever seeing any actual television programming other than these execrable commercials will reach the absolute, one. This morning, for twenty-one minutes, I was unable to find anything but commercials.

Now, were it not for the remote control device, I wouldn’t watch television at all. There is no way I will tolerate the obvious attempt to warp my mind and control my opinions represented by the boob-tube's damnable adds. I sit aiming the “remote” at the screen, resolutely clicking off each new attempt as it appears, changing channels until I find the news program – for decades now, all I watch – I’m “after.”

It’s a hell of a struggle, inasmuch as scheduling locally now provides for as much as three minutes of commercial messages for each minute of programming. There, for any of the few statisticians or mathematicians – only a few years ago, all the universities and colleges in the U.S. graduated four hundred, seventy-five Ph.D.s in mathematics – are the odds. This morning, I simply couldn’t find a channel that didn’t have a commercial playing. For a few minutes, the situation was only a nuisance.

Then, it became a real annoyance. Finally, it became a study. How the hell long would it be before I could find the news?

Twenty-one minutes!

When I did finally succeed in finding a news show, the commentator – nowadays, that’s everybody; nobody, after all, can just read mucking the news – was talking about the latest breakout of the willing-to-do-anything-for-a-buck “guerrilla marketing” craze. It seems a couple of loons working for Turner Broadcasting and some mindlessly greedy marketer name Aqua-Teen (Team?) Hunger Force chose National Security Alert condition Orange during which to stage their nitwit stunt.

Not knowing anything of history, of course, they wouldn’t know the tale of how Wild Bill Hickok killed his friend and deputy when the man ran up behind him during a gunfight. Back home, gentlemen, it was an aphorism that if you didn’t want to be taken for a wolf, you shouldn’t run with them – or “wear wolves’ clothing.”

But you, folks – you really don’t seen any connection between the two kinds of circumstance of which I speak here? You don’t notice a society and nation become so overwhelmingly addicted to selling and sales that it forces itself to live with insane machinations like the Aqua-Teen (what the hell is an “Aqua-Teen?”) stunt? Is there anything in this benighted bedlam of a country that isn’t for sale?

Whatever. Once I had finished my study of the commercialism situation, I proceeded to the corner where I meet the car-pool van for my commute to work. This morning upon reaching the neighbor’s SUV, however, I found everyone standing around, staring into the front seat – where his three-year-old daughter sat behind the wheel refusing to budge. “What’s up?” I asked. “Melanie wants to go along,” someone said. “Every time anyone goes near her, she throws a tantrum.”

“Yeah,” someone else said, “and I’m already going to be late for work.”

Incredulous, I looked at the kid’s dad, then around the circle of angry faces. “Do you mean to tell me,” I asked the six adults’ – maybe kill themselves in their haste to get there – “you’ll be late for work because a three year old won’t let you have the car?

Stop a minute. You know I’m pulling your leg, but think about it. A few days ago, a three-year old and her temper-tantrum held up a Southwest Airlines flight. A three-year old!

A couple weeks before, a comedian used the N-word (this week, it was the “J-word” – what the hell is the J-WORD?!) and held up for day, by occupation as it were, the delivery of real news to the public. A single goddamned word! Say the word “nigger” – a moronic epithet - and take over the nation’s intellect and intelligence - during the time of war – for days? Are you nuts?!

And you don’t see the similarity, the parallel?

Imagine a group of the Amish engaged as they do in erecting a house or barn (I understand, for instance, that the community terrorized by the madman who massacred school children there has razed the school building and is erecting another). Something like that. Imagine, though, that during the community gathering and operation that is part of a “raising,” somebody says the terrible “N-word (in German, of course, it’s “neger” – they speak German, you know – or is it only in English that the word has the bomb effect?).

”Ach, du lieber!” (German, again – it’s still okay politically). Everything must come to a halt. OF COURSE. No more construction today. The dreaded N-WORD has been spoken! Now, the operation is cursed. The building, too. Doch , even the land. A meeting must be called, and we must decide what to do with the wretch who uttered that verdammtes Wort (accursed word).

Enough – you get the point. Maybe. Besides, I’ve probably started another controversy. “A former bodyguard and gunslinger CIA hit man in Texas has slurred the Amish Community and by extension everyone who practices religion. Writing on his website today, Hal von Luebbert . . . “ Et cetera.
Good god, people – WILL you come to your senses?!

No, strike that. What’s left of your senses would, doubtless, result in even more of the same. You’re probably not even aware that your country, the United States of America, now resembles that bedlam whorehouse I referred to a minute ago more than anything else. Behaviorists and educators are studying and researching – some actually with what amounts to frantic urgency – trying to discover what the hell has gone wrong with your minds and thought processes.

And you, bewildered state that you’re in, are not even aware of it.

Sometimes, it’s necessary for someone on the outside and looking in – in this case an historian, perhaps - to understand what’s going on. You’re beginning to act like rats in a cage - once there have become too many. A kind of prison psychosis (oh, no? – well, look around at day-to-day events; you tell me what it looks like). I wrote, for instance, a couple of days ago about the way the national thought process that is the electronic media “reasons.” It’s appalling.

It’s appalling, and it resembles an equally confused and benighted educational system and the mentally meandering menagerie kids there also resemble. Do you realize that most of your kids graduating from high school can’t pass the eighth grade exams of only a few decades ago? Can’t identify the map outline of their country? Think General Douglas MacArthur won the Battle of Yorktown?

There’s more. In Texas, where we have the wondrous TAKS – “Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills” – kids are taught rote memorization of the exam. When scores rise, educators pat themselves on the back – obviously, the kids are better educated. Depends on what you mean by “educated,” I guess. Substitute teaching in Del Rio, I once put an elementary trigonometry problem up on the board, the better to occupy time than the usual movie shown by “subs.” When none of the kids could solve the problem, I wasn’t terribly surprised – South Texas isn’t exactly the land of rocket scientists, you know.

What shook me was when several students later informed me that the teacher couldn’t solve the problems, either.
The problem? “You’re standing a certain distance from a flagpole you want to measure without climbing. When you are D distance from the base of the pole, the angle from where you stand to the top of the pole is B, when you are D plus C from the pole, the Angle measured from the ground to the top of the pole is A. What is the formula for measuring the height of the pole?”

Listen to the new media and its geniuses, as I do, and you get even more despondent where the future of our nation is concerned. Picking at random from the literally dozens of examples I’ve collected just of late from newspapers, magazines, and television, I find crap like this:

“As competition among prospective tenants intensifies, apartment rents have not risen as sharply in the past three months of 2006 as they did earlier, the report said. But they did rise, increasing by 4.7 percent to an average $1,410 per month from $1,302 a year earlier.”

Whew! Do the math.

Here’s another; and, mind you, the author is criticizing journalistic innumeracy:

“Is this really a story? Guard survey hints at exodus.
“Just as the Pentagon is increasingly relying on the National Guard and other part-time troops for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, an internal Guard survey suggests that the demanding deployments could prompt a significant number of its soldiers to quit the military.
“A recent survey of 5,000 soldiers from 15 states showed that the rate at which Army Guard members choose to leave the military could jump - to 20-22% a year among those who have served long overseas tours, typically 12 months.
“Last year, about 16% of all Army Guard troops left the military as a result of retirement, injuries or a decision not to re-enlist, a figure slightly below the annual historical average of 18%. Among Guard soldiers returning from deployments in the USA and overseas from 2001 to 2003, only 12.5% left, statistics show.
“So, on average (Hal’s note: emphasis is mine) 18% of the National Guard declines to re-enlist each year. Last year, that rate was 16%, below average. This year, that rate might be 20 to 22%, above average...which gives us...hold on, got to fire up the supercomputer here... a two year rate that is.....carry the one....either 18%, exactly the historical average, or 19%, just one percentage point above the historical average.
“Forgive me if I don't fall into hysterics.”

Forgiven? Pal, a guy who publishes that kind of crap ought to be hanged; or educated, whichever would cause him the most grief. I don’t know, either (anybody remember Simpson’s Paradox? The goofy election that made G.W. Bush President of the U.S.?). I’ll bet if this guy – the writer, I mean - had ten bucks in his pocket and you gave him five, he’d think he was still seventeen percent ahead of the game when you took it back (do the math).

A while back there, when the government was spewing statistics concerning AIDS like a slot machine hit for the thousand dollar jackpot spitting quarters, I often sat shaking my head in wonder. In that neurotic way we have as a society acquired, the people determined to stir up mass sympathy for gays by way of convincing the public that heterosexuals were as “at risk” as homosexuals actually proved quite the contrary. In fact, the very statistics they fairly inundated us with revealed that even having had heterosexual sex every day for a year with a person known to have AIDS, the chance of contracting the disease was only fifty percent.

‘Spain dat one, Luci. And while you're "'splaining," 'splain why it is they don't just tell the truth. Sure as hell, at some point, somebody numerate told them the mathematical truth. Why didn't they tell it?

The war on drugs – in this world of the wimp nation, there’s always a war on something, isn’t there? – was as bad, or worse. A few days ago, one of our resident geniuses babbling journalistic nonsense in the broadcast form having to do with sports asseverated that steroid testing for Major League baseball players would be "ninety-eight percent accurate."

Wonderful! You may also recall that literally thousands of people have gone to jail on the basis of another kind of drug tests - this time, tests were “ninety-five percent accurate,” and two nights ago, discussing one of the ubiquitous – on television, anyway – rape or kidnapping cases, another of our bimbo broadcast babblers advised sagely that polygraph tests were "eighty percent accurate."

Did I say “wonderful?” Yeah, think I did. Let’s play with that a minute. Say there are one thousand (I don't follow the game, anymore - too damned phony for me) baseball players to test, and that, say again, .5 percent – one in two hundred – actually uses steroids. So we test somebody and tell the Commissioner of BB and BB brains everywhere – you think the media wouldn’t go into a feeding frenzy with something like that? – that Barry Bonds, for instance has “tested positive.” Note my use of the approved media jargon.

Okay, what do we know? Let’s suppose that three percent of the population actually uses steroid drugs, and there are – what did I say, a thousand? - players. That means that thirty guys are actual users and that, since the test is ninety-eight percent positive, twenty-nine guys get caught. Of the nine hundred, seventy-one players remaining, nineteen (two percent) also show positives, even though they are clean (“false positive”). So, forty-eight (twenty-nine and nineteen) guys tested positive for steroids, but only twenty-nine of them really use “performance-enhancing” drugs.

It’s “screw the other guys,” I guess. The price we have to pay for our freedom. Sure. Hell, yes - like all the guys convicted of rape when they weren’t guilty paid the price of feminism.

By the way, AIDS tests are supposedly about 98 (99.7) percent accurate, too, so go figure that one.

Folks, the inescapable fact is that Land of the Fee (spelling intentional), the Nation of Laws, has become too stupid for it to be a real democracy. What was it I quoted the other day – 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.”
The television media – to say nothing of the Internet – is a cerebrally a wasteland, riddled with Tower of Babel confusion not only of language but of thought in general. I was reminded again the other day concerning the hideous effect of illusion derived from journalistic innumeracy and spastic reasoning when someone happened to ask how tall Alan Ladd and Humphrey Bogart were. The two guys were five feet, five inches and five feet, eight inches tall, respectively, but they seemed on the movie screen to be as tall as, say, John Wayne – six, four – or Tom Selleck – six, five. It all has to do with illusion - special effects, huh?

It has a lot more to do with the movie producer and director. When you consider the effect nationally of things like journalistic innumeracy, incompetence, and downright stupidity, you already have what is surely just about the most untrustworthy medium of information one can imagine. That’s one thing. When you consider the way movie directors – and they have their television counterparts, you know – can make Alan Ladd or Humphrey Bogart appear to be the same size as John Wayne or Tom Selleck, that’s another.

If it doesn’t make you understand the reason that the CIA’s first and biggest program was Operation Mockingbird, the federal government operation designed to gain and keep control of the nation’s press and news media – and keep under control thereby the public’s mind and reality - nothing will.

How else would a nation come to be doing something as blind-drunk stupid as Iraq?

How else would a George W. Bush have risen to the nation’s highest office?

In us, the nation that is the United States of America, the world has what amounts to an inter-continental Frankenstein Monster, a great, dumb, stunned, stolid, and stupid anthropoid destroyer ranging about the planet, despoiling, laying waste, and killing.