You need extraordinary, unprecedented levels of mass stupidity to keep blindly pushing Big Business goals after former college cheerleader and US President George ‘Dubya’ Bush broke everything worth breaking and within reach, all very openly in favor of Big Business. It takes intense, widespread, almost supernatural stupidity to then look at rewarding that same political party that broke everything, wants to break everything all over again and has in fact done everything they could do to stand in the way of fixing all the things they admittedly broke in the past. Yet here we all are.
The Great Big Stupid (n): the byproduct of concentrated media efforts to generate confusion, misunderstanding and in other ways generally obfuscate the Truth, resulting in an underinformed electorate or populace, as well as a generalized rejection of intellectual or scientific authority and culminating in the utter destruction of objective Fact. eg. The biggest obstacle in front of mankind actually mobilizing to fight the very real and dire threat of Global Warming is the Great Big Stupid, which generates a false debate where there is none and has for some time.
First of all, I’m not from the United States, I was not born there and I don’t live there. Before I go one step further I want to clarify: I don’t think your average American is, per capita, any smarter or stupider than the citizens of my country or indeed any other First World country. In my own country there are people that read newspapers every day, pay attention to what’s going on and are capable of reflecting on events around them just as there are people that read nothing at all, work hard every day, watch tv at night and get drunk and hopefully laid on the weekend. This isn’t about either groups of people from either my nation, your nation or any other nation. This is about The Great Big Stupid. And it just so happens that it’s easiest to talk about it in America because you have entire News Networks dedicated to little else.
It will come as no surprise to anyone here that the inspiration for today’s little blog ‘o mine (I’m gonna let it SHINE!!!) was the crown-prince of Stupid, second only to George Bush himself for grand scale public stupidity, Fox News personality Glen Beck. Fresh from his big speech yesterday (from the exact date and location that MLK made his great "I have a dream speech," which is only cool if you're going for reverse points) he is interviewed by Fox News propagandist Chris Wallace. I watched the whole interview, which I don’t often do with Beck. I pegged him pretty early as a dangerous fool, a man encouraging violence and anarchy with a smile on his face and a tear in his eye, the proverbial dog who wouldn’t know what to do with that chased car if he caught it and nothing he’s done since has changed my opinion a whit, least of all this latest march on the capitol. I wanted to see if Wallace was going to call him on not laying out this supposed 100 year plan of his, which if he did, I must have missed it.
In this interview Beck reiterates his surprisingly bland speech from the day before, that America has to turn to God like he has, that America should turn away from Lies and Division like...ulp...he claims to have and repeats his convoluted, makes-sense-only-to-Beck logic that somehow the Civil Rights movement can and needs to be reclaimed for the benefit of old, rich, white people. Lost forever, it seems, was the planned unveiling of Beck’s ‘100 Year Plan for America’ which I was genuinely curious about, in a driving-slowly-by-a-car-accident kind of way. He called it off, unless I misundertand, this unveiling and that may be the real story of that day (or at least that rally held on a much more important day) and we may or may not learn what manner of madness, stupidity and outright impossibility he and the Baby Jesus had dreamed up for the next American Century and whatever could have happened to make him not go through with it. I mean really, if there’s a bridge too far for this guy, I’m genuinely curious to know what it is. Probably for the best. The more you stare into the abyss...
But how not to stare into the abyss? It’s everywhere! Fox can still call itself Fair and Balanced in spite of having the top 2012 Republican potentials on their payroll and having donated at least a million dollars to the Republican party this month alone, CNN follows up a story about Black people being racist with a story that Gulf spill probably wasn’t as bad as we all thought it was and MSNBC breathlessly reports the very latest, up-to-the-minute foolishness of either the Tea Party or Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh, all of whom are demonstrable nuts that say and do ridiculous things. Might as well keep a camera on the chimp cage in the hopes that one will fling shit at the wall. And that it’ll stick. Flip back to CNN and they’re going to have yet another ‘debate’ on whether Global Warming is real or not. A six minute debate(!) between a legitimate climatologist and a non-scientist that works for some Big Oil funded, grand sounding group like the Center for Sensible Earth Solutions. To be sure, there will be a very spirited exchange of talking points yet sadly, again, there can be no emerging consensus amongst guests, let alone an audience. Only amongst climatologists (which are the only scientists that matter in the debate), all over the world. Stupid. Of the Great Big persuasion.
Why has it gotten worse? Look, it’s no shadowy conspiracy thing. It’s obvious. It’s right out there. Media IS Big Business and to assume they don’t have bias let alone an agenda is naïve, infantile and just actually counterintuitve. Of course they do and how it relates to the Great Big Stupid is just as obvious, as I said in the beginning: it does indeed take intense, widespread almost supernatural stupidity to look at rewarding that same political party that broke everything, that seeks to return to the same policies that broke everything and has in fact done everything they could do to stand in the way of fixing all the things they admittedly broke. The party of Corporate Power gets yet another, fairly standard lift from the Corporate Media and so it all goes.
Which brings me to the nut of the thing. The Media has always trafficked in a wide variety of Stupid but never to the extent it has in the new Millennium. One would have hoped they would have changed their ways after leading a nation, wrongly, into the Gulf War. That there would be an effort to create better, more accurate and informative news but the funny thing is that the exact opposite has occurred. The news is less reliable now than it ever has been. Massive lies and distortions not only go unchecked but grow into broader themes and debates, entirely regardless of the fact that they are inherently and demonstrably false. Think of what’s been accomplished against President Obama, let alone his agenda. First he was a Secret Muslim. Next he was is a Radical Black Power Terrorist Hugger. After that he was the Socialist Hitler wannabe, taking over whole Industries to suit his nefarious ends. Now, for a jaw-dropping number of Americans he’s a Secret Muslim again. By November they’ll be saying he’s from Outer Space and none of it matters. It’s utter crap, it’s always been utter crap and it will never be anything but utter crap. And it seems desperate to me.
The Left does better but it’s still the Left. Meaning it’s not objective. Nothing is. And I love Olbermann but he loses me when he breaks out the stick puppets and makes falsetto voices to imitate political figures. This is the news, not Saturday morning cartoons.
I would say that with the exception of Maddow (who makes everybody else look like they're standing still, in this humble blogger's opinion), the Stupid grows larger and larger everyday.
And yet....?
And yet on this same Sunday morning wisdom comes from the least suspected of sources. At the end of one of the news shows, Brian Williams is interviewing famous actor and heartthrob Brad Pitt, who’s up to his ears in rebuilding New Orleans, who figures since it’s gotta be rebuilt anyways, why not build them sustainably, efficiently...properly? An actor. He points out a row of houses, basically on stilits higher than the floodwaters that tore apart that town and for a few days made the United States of America look like a Third World Country. "Last month," Pitt informs us, "those houses created more energy than they consumed." Smart. Very smart. The future. "That’s why we call our project ‘ Make It Right,’" he says, "because why wouldn’t we build it right?" The only part where he looks confused at all is when he tries to figure out how things failed so badly before. "Just build the levies right, you know?" He asks, "it’s like the BP thing, why wouldn’t you...why wouldn’t you build it right?" Why not indeed.
And yet on this same Sunday morning wisdom comes from where you’d most like it to be in spite of the Media that covers it, from the President of the United States, Barack Obama. Once again he gives another great speech. His command of the facts are impressive, as always. His ideas are clear, his words are wise, and he is brilliant, just like he has been in so many of his speeches. But why does it depress me on this day when I deliberate so over the Great Big Stupid? Shouldn’t it reinvigorate me to meet the exact opposite of that I abhor? It doesn’t.
Because I know the media is working hard every day to take all those things that I admire and respect not just about this man but any great man: his sense of Reason, Logic, Wisdom etc and turn all those things into a minus. They call him Spock. He’s an egghead. He’s out of touch when he doesn’t respond to the latest nonscandal of the day. Why doesn’t he go to church for us, to reassure us they ask, knowing full well they’d castigate him the very next day for such a crass and clearly political move. Why doesn’t he climb down into the Great Big Stupid with the rest of us and show us his birth certificate once and for all? Why does he have to be such an Elitist Spockian Egghead all the time, anyways?
In closing, I would just add what I once chatted with somebody about that Great Big Stupid media canard, you know the one, the ‘which Presidential candidate would you most like to have a beer with,’ but the conversation broke down when I said that’s so far away from being the right question that I don’t have a clue how I’d answer it or what it would even mean if I did. I would imagine George Bush was tons of fun to drink with but, it turns out, he was a shit awful President, worst ever. Rather than asking who you’d most like to drink with, change the question around. Pretend it isn’t a country but rather a submarine and you are a lowly yeoman. Your Captain literally holds your life in his hands with his every decision. Do you want a guy who’s good at kegstands or do you want the brightest bulb in the room? I’ll leave you with that.
-iSenseChange
NonRandomMP3age: "Vampire Blues" by Neil Young