Stupidity Rules
I first saw this bumper sticker on a car 40 years ago when I lived in Florida. It was plastered on a pickup truck that had all the earmarks of being a redneck ride… complete with a gun rack in the rear window and coon dogs in the back.
It made me laugh, but now, as I have gotten older I realize just how truly tragic it was.
If you wanted to be a stupid redneck back then with thugs for kids, well, that was your choice.
But as the years passed it seemed like people were getting dumber all the time, and it was part of a deliberate campaign to spread ignorance ….literacy rates are dropping, schools aren’t teaching kids much any more beyond how to memorize information, park their butts at a desk for half the day and above all, do not think for yourselves.
Television (tell-a-vision) has gotten more idiotic by the season. Movies no longer have actual plots and dialogue…they have bombs and car chases.
Journalism no longer examines real stories….Just 6 corporations own 90 percent of the media in the US and these corporations don’t want anyone getting smarter from what they publish or air on TV!
So we get “stories” about celebrities screwing up or having babies or breaking up…really, who cares?
There’s a fascinating book that was written by Richard Hofstadter in the mid-1960s titled “Anti Intellectualism in American Life.”
It explores how anti-intellectualism took hold of our collective psyches, and how it has been encouraged by the ruling class since time immemorial.
Powerful people and politicians have made a point of sneering at egg head intellectuals for being effete weaklings who are not capable of doing a real man’s job.
They’ve made the action hero type the ideal which we should all admire…the kind of people who act instead of think!
But they themselves tap the best and the brightest people they can to run their think tanks and advise them on policy.
Not that the people in government themselves are particularly intelligent these days…or ever have been. Still, they are smart enough to enrich themselves and plunder the planet and keep the rest of us in the dark.
Our school systems have deteriorated to the point where kids are being graduated who cannot read but then, who wants slaves who are informed and can think for themselves?
Stephanie Kelley
