There has always been a significant ignorance demographic in this country, particularly focused in certain areas. However, it seems to have grown in relative numbers and willingness to vocalize - to the point that it feels as if the country is inhabited by two subspecies of Humans: Homo Sapien Sapien and Homo Sapien Redneckus Giganticus Americanus.
I saw a bumper sticker the other day on the deformed and rusting bumper of a rundown old Oldsmobile, "I will keep my guns, my rights, and my money; you can keep the change." What irony - how oblivious!
The country is staggering off a near economic collapse, its competitiveness is vaporizing, unemployment is hitting records, real wages have been falling for a decade, we are immersed in two wars, one wholly unnecessary, improvidently and fraudulently commenced, and this sage rejects change in favor of keeping money he does not have, his gun that no one wants and his ill understood "rights" while decrying taxes that he does not pay. By all means we should reject change, it seems so obvious!?
This bumper sticker, gun rights, Sara Palin, Joe the Plumber, the Tea Party, what is this all about? What is the thread?
For Redneckus, the gun is an icon, worshiped as the defining cornerstone of American culture (the latter an illusion from Hollywood, drafted onto and supported by the gun industry). No right is absolute, not freedom of speech nor even of religion, but for Redneckus, any effort at all to mitigate the needless carnage of guns is unacceptably un-American.
Every man needs his pride, for Redneckus much is derived from his identity as an American. In Redneckus’s view, being America without more makes one superior to the rest of humanity, a concept that provides an instant sense of self-worth without having to personally achieve anything. Similarly, the gun bestows life-snuffing power upon an individual without the need to accomplish anything - elevator shoes for the male ego otherwise without foundation. Fusing the two concepts yields a cultural illusion and a false but therapeutic pride. Be born in America, buy a gun, wave a flag, and you can puff your chest in superiority and consider yourself a man above others. The further down the socioeconomic scale one goes, the more prevalent this fusion of gun, nation, and male ego becomes.
So that is the gun and flag but what is the deal with taxes, especially as Redneckus is likely taking out in benefits and services more than he is paying in? The answer is simple. Redneckus lives in an intellectual echo chamber that has been constructed just for him, in which he is daily dosed with mythologies aimed at serving the interest of those controlling the message, not his own. With his self-image so levered to his identity as an American, one need only convince Redneckus that taxes (or anything else, like universal health care) are un-American, and he will be dead set against them regardless of how he benefits from them. To convince him, gain his trust, to gain his trust, identify with his preexisting prejudices, and justify them as also American. It is that simple.
The “attack on Christmas” (the only attack on Christmas has been the successful one waged by the commercial interests to co-opt it as an engine of mindless consumption), gay marriage, death panels, Obama care (whatever that really is) one can go on and on, there is an endless list of boggy men and red-herring issue that can be counted on to keep Redneckus distracted from his own interest and reality in general for that matter - once you have the formula down and are willing to use it.
The old Olds, with its sticker, evidences a culture of ignorance that feels inadequate and threatened and is being manipulated on those accounts. Where else on the planet is there a democracy in which being an intellectual is seen as a disqualification from office?
It is difficult to imagine large numbers of heads so empty as to give the likes of Rush Limbaugh a hearing, but nature abhorring a vacuum, Limbaugh finds it easy to fill the profoundly uninformed with bigotry and mythology, while Fox News daily pumps overt propaganda into the same uncritical craniums, telling Redneckus what he/she wants to hear rather than what is.
This conscious exploitation of ignorance is a process that has gone on for over a generation now. The result is the emergence of a cultural cancer formed around new and renewed mythologies spun and supported by various political and economic special interests, founded upon exaggerations and falsehoods about what has made the country great and what has held it back. Low taxes equal prosperity, free markets are infallible, government is always in the way and contributes nothing, America is a Christian nation, and any collective action is evil socialism, on and on.
One is tempted to draw comparison to the cultures of classic Greece and posit the Greek athlete and his world and life view against tattooed beer bellied and helmetless Billy Bob Redneckus on his cycle. (You see, a helmet is un-American; it symbolizes community interest.) The former, informed principally by intuition, evidenced a nearly divine self-image founded in self-discipline, while Billy Bob, who has access to a nearly divine body of knowledge, evidences ignorance and self-neglect, solidified in emotionally supported superstitions and a belief that he is entitled to pride by the geography of his birth.
However, one need not reach so far to view the scene of contemporary American culture with despair. Just travel back to the Sixties and Seventies here at home, back when we educated most of our children in competent public schools, teaching them not just the three “Rs” (Code for a chamber of commerce education – sufficient to economic functionality but not to be critically and independently minded – the very cornerstone laid to make contemporary Redneckus, with his Hollywood vision of history and America possible - and with it the modern Republican party) but also civics, history, art. All children were expected to be fit, not just those destined for the circus of professional athletics. School cafeterias served wholesome meals, and school halls were not full of commercial messages but entreaties to seek knowledge and the fruits of it.
In those days, it seems that the country understood the founding documents, viewing them as aspirational, representing not a nation that was but one that might be. It was accepted that it was each generation’s task to move the country toward fulfilling their promise, exactly the opposite view held by contemporary Redneckus. In that time, the pursuit of that promise took the form of a commitment to uproot deeply ingrained racism, a culture built around it, and the ignorance that sustained both as well as the hardcore poverty that was part of it all.
Reflect for a moment upon the sense of collective direction and leadership required for a nation to consciously set upon such a bold agenda. But this was nothing for a country literally going to the moon, committed to exploring space, awash in discovery, growth, invention and intellectual adventure. In those days, the echo of the Big Bang was being discovered, and the transistor, the technological foundation of the modern world, was being created through a substantial public investment. America was the world’s university; ecological awareness was emerging, and the risks of an exploding human population were actually being addressed.
Dedicated to truly being a beacon on a hill (however unwise some of the efforts may have been at times), America had a clear national identity and sense of direction, its prinicple faith was the same as at its birth - in the power of human reason; its principle collective purpose to harness the benefits of reason for all. “Ask not what you’re country can do for you…”, resonated to empower the collective will to do all the forgoing while also waging a cold war to sustain the values of Western Civilization that America manifested.
Today, in contrast, the nation lacks the intellectual rigor and sense of collective purpose to put in place a functional healthcare system. No, it can’t even have a clear-headed debate about doing so - there is too much intellectual corruption and self-interest feeding on and empowering the vast reservoir of ignorance and mythology among Redneckus to maintain a focused, rational debate.
A nation that supposes itself the wealthiest on the planet cannot manage to provide proper health care for all its citizens in part because it is beset by an epidemic of cultural-based diseases, diseases self-inflicted by systematic individual indolence and aided by the view that anything that can be sold at a profit and be swallowed is entitled to be viewed as food (The coca-cola corporation's spokesperson recently stated on NPR that there was nutritional value in a soft drink, citing the water content as essential to life).
Not since the discovery of sanitation (ironically at about the beginning of the Enlightenment) has any modern society experienced such a panoply of self-inflicted disease. Though necessarily central to the problem, this cultural-based public health phenomenon is all but ignored in the rancorous, largely misdirected healthcare debate. It should not be surprising that a country beset by an epidemic of self-inflicted diseases would lack the collective intellectual discipline to insist upon a rational, universal (a redundant statement) healthcare system.
The reality is that despite the country's long-standing and early commitment to public education, the country never quite succeeded in eradicating hardcore ignorance. It enclaved in the Deep South and Intermountain regions where, for the most part, it lived humbly in justified self-doubt, conspiratorial in seeking its own end until Jimmy Carter inspired the Regan Revolution and a new Republican Party to empower and harness the ignorance demographic by endorsing and validating its default culture, mindset and the mythologies that sustained it.
Until the Regan era, the bulk of America’s working class was not proud of ignorance; they wanted out of it, and they wanted their children out of it, and they understood that this required collective as well as individual effort, and in each generation more escaped and fewer were left behind until the nation’s defeat in Vietnam set the psychological stage to catalyze the current detour, but that is another story. Suffice it here to say that in America, the age of reason has been substantially ushered out, and a new American mythology ushered in that has sustained the right ever sense and, in the process, exploded the philosophical middle ground where consensus in America use to be found, polarizing the country and leaving us with no coherent path forward.
The Republican party, historically a functional instrument of a rational political process, has become addicted to manipulating the ignorant demographic, seeking power for power's sake, and, in the process, declaring war on reason and the collective interest. A generation of this has yielded a Congress populated with intellectual knuckle draggers and right-wing ideologues that a few generations ago would have embarrassed a regressive southern state legislature. Not since the Civil War has the demographic of ignorance been so completely manipulated by its emotions, faiths, and prejudices to its own and the nation’s detriment.
