THE NAKED ANIMAL

I was cruising the internet recently in an attempt to gather information about my theory of the day: that the number of countries and world renowned thinkers who hate us is multiplying in direct ratio to the rate at which we're getting collectively dumber, causing an isolating ignorance that is perhaps the most insidious invader of freedom.

One phrase popped into my head: "Dumbing Down," or more precisely, "The Dumbing Down of America." I wasn't sure of its provenance, but I took it on as I do most such memes, as a clue from the collective consciousness. I soon found out that the phrase originated with lifetime educator Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt's book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, which indicts an elitist cabal of social engineers for making our children stupid systematically in order to create a new legion of completely mindless consumers and menial workers. If that sounds like science fiction to you, just look at how many other educators have agreed with, and applauded, her.

Now, whether or not you believe there's a totalitarian plot afoot by the moneyed elite of the world to turn the rest of us into drones for the satisfaction of their queenly coffers or not (remember, even paranoids are right 10 percent of the time), you, like I, if you know how to read and use a computer, are probably wondering why the lowest common denominator seems to be holding ever firmer sway over nearly our entire culture, and how on earth it continues to fall lower and lower. I sometimes feel helpless in the face of so much bluntness (hey, I get razzed even by my FELLOW ENGLISH TEACHERS for using "big words"), which is one of the various reasons I escape so often into the sharper contours of the dark side, where people don't go around in a fog pretending everything's okay. Finding a new kindred soul or even ranting with my friends (about the same things, over and over again) always brings a little light to the subject.

What really brightened things up that particular day was that my "dumbing down" search unearthed some of the smartest, most incisive writing I've run across in recent memory, yielding no less than five solid, non-repetitive pages of worthwhile links. Many of these links were to great blog posts, such as this one from one of my favorite radical anonymous sites, and this super-concise observation of the phenomenon by Bob Geiger, the blogosphere's Yellow Dog Democrat. Here's one by Shalana Millard for the Democratic Underground, in which she perspicaciously points out that the only thing scarier than the possibility of the radical right having stolen the election through fraud is the possibility that everyone (i.e. more than half of the voting public) really is stupid enough actually to have voted for Bush.

And here's my favorite of the batch, a beautiful manifesto about the problem, its causes and its possible solutions, written by Manuel Valenzuela for the Axis of Logic, a thoroughly marked crossroads of liberal viewpoints on modern culture. Valenzuela's piece has a bewitching cadence that is sometimes strongly (and charmingly) reminiscent of Yoda. It's the technique of beginning a sentence with an adjectival phrase that does it: Falsely happy are the ignorant, for they know neither what they know not nor that they know not. Things like that (though not that exactly, don't worry).

But outrage and eloquence prompted by the dumbing-down problem is not an exclusively liberal response. Here's an article from the conservative Eagle Forum that (with typical white male defensiveness) equates the dumbing-down process with emasculation, and here's one from right-wing talk show host Neal Boortz, whose comments I am surprised to agree with 100 percent.

The conundrum in all of this is that the liberals are attacking the conservatives and the conservatives are attacking the liberals for a problem that runs much deeper than the schisms between opposing political or moral (is there a difference anymore?) ideologies. We have all been giving up our own personal power in exchange for the shepherding comfort of a powerful civilization for so long that we have no concept of what the freedom to enjoy our own power might unleash.

But the dumbest mistakes of all in this hugely erroneous equation are people like me, who know about all this,know about it and feel about it in deep, resonant ways, yet willfully court denial in order to get by in our already stressful enough lives (thank you very much!), relying on some kind of vague spiritual/cultural sea change (it's bound to happen, right? turn, turn, turn...)while the fundamentalist religious fanatics who are hijacking our reality from all sides adamantly go about their almost instinctive business of sending us all even further down the dumb hole.

Being an idealist, though, I see the acts of some Democrats who are vocally reneging on their previous gift of imprimatur to Bush's war machine as evidence of a coming turn in the complacency-vs.-involvement tide. With this post, I burst through my own membrane of complacency into full involvement in my own destiny, and remind myself that right thought without right action amounts to right nought but rot on the hot dot.

Huh?

Anyway...Fly! Be free!

Categories: education, politics, conspiracies, culture, freedom, trends