"If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.We create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us -- those elites who run the institutions -- very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.
Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution's members.
Two hundred years ago no one would have thought sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.
The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political.
In a nation that equates democracy with everyman's right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable.
But when Americans too poor to buy health care nevertheless vote to retain the corporate auction process, that is cultural stupidity.
Cultural stupidity might not be so bad, were it not self-reproducing and viral, and prone to place stupid people in charge.
Neither populist, nor authentic movement, the Tea Party may yet prove historic, however, by seriously fucking things up more than they already are. Spun entirely from manufactured spectacle (and thus void of cohesive political philosophy or internal logic), the Tea Party lurches across the political landscape bellowing at the cameras and collecting the victims of cultural ignorance in sort of a medieval idiots crusade.
Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon."
-Joe Bageant
*(excerpted from: "AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM?")
Read the entire article HERE: http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/12/america-y-ur-peeps-b-so-dum.html#more
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