So here is the way it is now: Ameri-cans have gotten intellectually lazy over the years.
More have college degrees, but few bother to read. If we read at all, it’s pretty much headlines and box scores. An education is viewed as vocational training: If it doesn’t help us get a better-paying job than our neighbor, we can’t be bothered. Our best-selling books are almost all self-help — diets, sex tips, how to stay young forever. If it’s about ourselves, well, you’ve got our attention.
The stuff that used to be confined to glossy magazines is now at the top of The New York Times best-seller list. The pulp novels we read on the beach are the “literature” of our age. Goodbye William Faulkner and John Cheever, hello Dan Brown. When we read about politics, it is usually only to bolster our own biases. We keep ourselves amused with cell phones, iPods and computer games. Youth, on whom we have lavished so much tuition, has trouble figuring out who the hell the vice president is and whether Abraham Lincoln or Jack Kennedy was our first president.
Most adults don’t know Iran from Iraq and, if gas didn’t cost so much, wouldn’t bother at all about the Middle East. Most of us still believe Saddam Hussein started 9/11 and that he had Weapons of Mass Destruction. We are easily distracted by arguments about gay marriage and flag-burning. We have become a vacuous, arrogant, know-it-all bunch, without knowing much of anything. The question is: How long can a democracy function when so many are, for all practical purposes, brain dead?
In a fast-paced, dangerous world, it is tough to play catch-up. Being a citizen of the most powerful democracy requires one to be well-informed. You can’t learn about the complexities of the world by watching the few minutes devoted to it on the 11 o’clock news, which are squeezed in between the current weather emergency and the latest in cosmetic surgery. The average local newscast spends more time on the Five Day Forecast than it does on the war in Iraq.
In the absence of intelligent information, we rely on half-truths, rumors and insights, which are the equivalent of taxicab wisdom. I get e-mails every week from people whose outrage is based entirely on urban myths. George Carlin said this, the ACLU did that, Starbucks hates our soldiers, members of Congress are getting millionaire pensions, etc. I have become obsessed with fact-checking every one of these messages (there are Web sites such as Snopes.com devoted to debunking myths). I found almost every e-mail totally false and these un-truths have now been shared with hundreds of others who, in turn, circulate them to their friends. It may be futile, but I attempt to straighten out the sender in hope the truth also will be passed around. I never hear back and, after a few days, the same person is sending out more lies and distortions across the misinformation highway.
When it is so easy to lie, then people get lied to. That is an axiom of political life. And the deceptions keep coming. The benefits of tax cuts for the middle class are inflated. The deficit becomes a positive economic indicator. The disaster in Iraq becomes a matter of media bias — they just won’t report the good news. Israel defending itself becomes another act of Zionist aggression. Our president ignoring constitutional limits becomes a key weapon in the war on terror. Criticizing the administration becomes unpatriotic. Global warming is shrugged off as just politics. Superstition replaces reason and becomes the law of the land.
This generation has the greatest opportunity in history. More Americans go on to higher education than ever before. We live in an age of magnificent wonder; knowledge is as accessible as it has ever been. In my lifetime, television, computers, VCRs, DVD players and mobile phones have been invented. We can touch another part of the world in an instant. But, if the greatest use of the Internet is searching for porn, watching reality shows replaces reading and talking on cells consists of giving a play-by-play of last night’s date, then what have we really achieved?
