Begin rant
If you read this blog you should already know that thanks to Bush Americans are on average poorer than ever before, not to mention enjoying relatively lower standards of living compared to Europe. Americans can mock Europe's socialized medicine all they want but ask them how they would feel about 5 to 6 weeks of vacation a year. I've yet to find a politician who could spin that as bad for you... of course could just tell you that you're busy working hard pursuing the American dream and you don't need all that vacation - working hard is patriotic, yada, yada, yada... Unforunately people are dumb enough to fall for that and not even think about why when standards are supposedly improving they need to work more and more and more...
And if you have half a brain you'd realize that pissing away over $1 trillion dollars (folks that's $3,333 per man, woman, child and illegal immigrant) on fighting Iraq has lead us to the point where we can only blow hot air at other nations who dare defy Uncle Sam. Team USA invade Iran? Not happening. Attack North Korea? No way. All of a sudden Bush thinks maybe he'll give diplomacy a chance. Scratch from the table that his own country would be rioting (not just protesting this time) in the streets if there was another war started in The (Old) White (boys) man (club) House. The US simply doesn't have the resources at hand to do engage any more enemy combatants, I mean it can't even protect its own borders, let alone remote ones.
But the latest revelation is that oh boy, this country has gone dumb and dumber. The simple fact that the above are true is a testament to that fact. A smart populace doesn't put up with declining living standards, a smart populace doesn't support policies that actually make the country more vulnerable. Now we find that America has become a bunch of telly addicts and the media refuses to cover anything but pulp fiction. Anything remotely like an "issue" is off limits so we can become comfortably numb while we become comfortably dumb.
This shouldn't be any surprise to anyone who has been near a school recently and knows how instead of education the prime occupation of kids these days is remembering their A to Es - that's endless streams of A to E answers to multi-choice questions. Whatever happened to essay questions, or completely open ended questions where you might have to express and think for yourself? If all you've ever experienced is A to E questions where the right answer is on the paper somewhere (just roll the dice...) what that heck are you supposed to do in real life where the real answer is something you have to provide? Instead we now have some kind of institutionalized knowledge welfare where everyone expects at every step of the way to be handed a guaranteed right answer to life, the universe and everything on a plate. All they have to do is roll the dice and pick that answer - and if they don't, well they just got unlucky. Whatever happened to just "using your loaf?" (brain).
Instead kids are busy learning to talk with text and email abbreviations (BRB, BF, ROTFL etc.) they are also busy assimilating their entire knowledge base as some bizarre DNA like encoding of DABCEABCDEBABCDCAABEEACEDADBE... etc. and that is supposed to be their and this country's key to prosperity. My only question is just how bad does it have to get before this country just starts falling apart, I'll give it a generation at most so it won't be the global warming that gets us, it'll be global (or in this case local) dumbing that does it...
Assisting that increasing dumbness (and numbness) is America's collective obsession with "faith in god" which statistics claim is something like 90%. But when you really look at it you find that these days more people either don't believe, or don't have any strong convictions than those who are regular church going theists who have any clue of what they really believe (and even if you go to church on a weekly basis it has no real bearing on whether you actually believe or know what you believe - I've heard at some churches there's free food and wine available followed by a good old sing song, doesn't sound so bad...). I guess it shouldn't really come as any surprise that if America was going to do religion it would do it at least as badly as it does everything else these days (diplomacy, economics, health care, welfare, education). And yet the media continues to pander to the deep pocketed god-corps as freely as it does other corporations, so there really is no breaking out of their stranglehold any more than we can escape from the tyranny of the A to E generation. Sigh. Try and get some real publicity for non religious "free thought" and you'll be ostracized and ridiculed just like homosexuals and racial minorities were just a few decades ago.
Oy.
End of rant
