Say it with me: My country is stupid. My rant switch is set to “on.”
Not just the AM Hate Radio dittoheads, nor the teabaggers, the ant-science climate change deniers, the screamers, the birthers, the deathers – no, not just the obvious ones.
The people who believe that we still live in a Democracy, even as we watch as our Dem majority allows health-care “reform” to be dumped on its ear, transmogrified from reform, into a buy-it-or-face-a-fine tyranny, a giveaway to the insurance corporations that wrought this damnable mess in the first place. Think your vote matters anywhere near as much as, say, the interests of Blue Cross Blue Shield?
In this corporatist America?
Don’t be frakking stupid.
(I can’t advocate not voting, but the change to make our votes matter at this point would have to be pretty vast.)
I think journalism is pretty well dead here in the U.S., mostly because we don’t care. I’m a news junkie who’s watched CNN do a breathless, lengthy report on the benefits of Onstar technology in your car one week, then awoke to a rah-rah piece of payola/shit about Dominoes changing its pizza recipes.
The best takedown of Sarah Palin arrived via Bill O’Reilly. Ostensibly a friendly interviewer, with the repetition of a single question, Bill-O reduced her to ungrammatical jibberish:
O'Reilly: Let me be bold and fresh again. Do you believe you are smart enough, and incisive enough, intellectual enough, to handle the most powerful job in the world?
Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the, um, the, ah -- kind of spineless -- a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with elite Ivy League education and -- fact resume that's based on anything but hard work and private-sector, free-enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I'm not saying that that has to be me.
And yet. And yet people still follow her, a flock of lobotomized sheep following a gibberish-spouting nutcase.
Our “journalists” suck. They don’t care enough to cover what the HCR bill has become, don’t give a damn about naked payola, and for some reason treat Sarah Palin as though she makes sense.
I spoke with a group of international students at my university a few weeks back. They have trouble believing that anyone wrestles with Calc 1 here, because they took that sort of stuff in high school. They seem astonished to have a country such as ours taking the lead in the world.
I am reminded of what struck me as a humiliating visit to the Creation Museum, a project so abjectly illiterate of science that it reduced at least one of the visiting scientists to tears.
How and why are so many people sleepwalking through all of this?
I’d honestly like an answer.