Eight years ago, with the publication of Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, our country had a debate about whether its citizens were becoming less intelligent. This year, we had a debate about how big Donald Trump’s penis is…. Two years before Jacoby’s book came out, Mike Judge set his sci-fi comedy Idiocracy 500 years in the future, when President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, a former champion professional wrestler, peppers his speeches with curses…. Nearly everything predicted in Idiocracy has come true, and more. In the movie, the language is so coarsened, there are curses on billboards; the ones for this year’s MTV Movie Awards read F-ck the Tux. As predicted, words are being replaced by pictograms. Kids are having birthday parties at Hooters; in the movie they have them at an overtly sexualized version of Fuddruckers called Buttf-ckers.
I think it was P.T. Barnum who once famously said that you could never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. That statement is as true- perhaps even moreso- today as it was when first uttered so many years ago.
I’ve written a lot about our collective descent into idiocracy, the collective and inexorable degrading of our capacity for (and tolerance of) intellectual discourse. It would be something of a stretch to hold that critical thinking and intellectual rigor are prominent features of American public discourse. The lowest common denominator has almost always held sway. Too many Americans, when they think at all, are easily swayed and manipulated by those gifted in the arts of propaganda. The mob mentality, the moral equivalent of an angry rabble carrying torches and pitchforks, has often been and remains how issues and/or broad questions have been addressed and resolved.
America: Land of the free, home of the easily manipulated and propagandized.
Terry Crews, who played President Camacho, has been freaked out that Trump, a guy he’s met and liked, has stolen his character. “I look now, and I go, Holy cow, these people are actually talking about each other’s wives. It’s not politics. It’s like ‘Yo mama,’” he said. “The cult of masculinity has gone amok. What he is saying is, I will beat you down and take your women.” Only not nearly as eloquently.
The ascent of Donald Trump, the politician (as opposed to Donald Trump, the self-fellating monument to his own ego) has destroyed any lingering hope that America might somehow redeem itself and self-arrest the seemingly inexorable slide into a public discourse worthy of a double-digit IQ. With campaign appearances which are a combination three-ring circus/Hitler Youth rally, Trump has led that way as America exits the realm of high (or, really, ANY) expectations of our politicians and settled in the domain of ignorance, propaganda, disinformation, and reaction.
MAKE AMERICA HATE AGAIN!!
We have only ourselves to blame for our refusal to indulge in anything reminiscent of intellectual rigor.
The Texas Republican Party’s 2012 platform is a perfect example of the growing resistance to critical thinking:
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
Translated, it means “We oppose any curriculum designed to teach students to think for themselves. Students should be taught to believe what they’re taught and to obey their parents without question or reservation. Our public schools should teach the importance of believing what the government, the Church, and/or Big Business preach.”
That may sound overly dramatic, but I’d submit it’s not far from the truth. Conservatism generally- and Republicanism in particular- are predicated on authoritarianism. When people, especially the younger generation, begin to think for themselves, they have a tendency to ask uncomfortable and inconvenient questions. Teach them to obey, and those in control will never have to worry about uncertainty or unrest.
Then again, doing what you’re told is a helluva easier than thinking for yourself, right?
Greetings from our new idiocracy.
