Celebrating Moronitude . . . . it is once again time for a GOP confab.

[Stinky The Clown]

Once again, Wendy of Wasilla is crowing about how FUCKING IGNORANT she is.

And people are cheering at that.

Tell me why there is no cause for worry for our country.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Sadly, this is nothing new.

Way back in the Pleistocene era, when I was in college, we read Richard Hofstader's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," in which he explains that there has always been a strong tendency to look down on educated people as useless snobs; that "real" Americans were self-made, salt-of-the-earth types who didn't need none o' that fancy-pants book-learnin'. In the '50s, the right wing denounced "eggheads." Now they denounce "liberal elites." Nothing has changed in all those years, it seems. Nanookie of the North is just the latest avatar of proud ignorance.

[ashling]

3. His thesis is aptly followed and expanded by Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason

"During the past four decades, America's endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic. This new form of anti-rationalism, at odds not only with the nation's heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge, has propelled a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater damage than it's historical predecessors inflicted on American culture and politics ...

... America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism -- as opposed to the recognizable cyclical strains of the past -- their virulence of the current outbreak is inseparable from an un mindfulness that is, paradoxically, both aggressive and passive. This condition is aggressively promoted by everyone from politicians to media executives ....."
Text

[lunasun]

4. Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason

Thanks Ill have to get that as I agree 100% with the excerpt . Intellectuals as a group for political fodder has played out before . ... does the book have a happy ending???

[ashling]

6. I have started reading it several times over the past year or so

but I always get sidetracked onto a different project. To make a long story short, I haven't finished ... but that has got to be one of my all time favorite quotes. It is from the introduction, which speaks a good deal about Hofstader.

Yesterday there was a thread that blamed it all on the disappearance of penmanship instruction ... well not all ...

[JuniperLea]

2. Life Imitates Art... Mike Judge predicted this long ago...

I swear his "Idiocracy" predicted the TeaBagger movement.



My middle kid asked me the other day if I thought Palin wrote the second book... I said...

No, she used up all her words also too not writing the first book as well.

I wish I knew a political comic writer... I have this idea for a three pane strip:

#1 - Palin is driving a Hummer, complete with gun racks, American flag, etc., and she's in a big hurry as she pulls into the parking lot of a stadium where her name appears on the marquee: "Sarah Palin Speaks Today!"

#2 - Sarah, now out of the Hummer, is running through the parking lot. The lot is lined with clunkers, each with a TeaBagger bumper-sticker or two, all clearly readable. Sarah is scribbling something on the palm of her hand.

#3 - Sarah takes the podium, and starts reading from her palm... which consists of all the bumper-sticker slogans seen on the cars in the parking lot... the crowd cheers!

[lonestarnot]

5. Sure that wasn't Windy?