Greetings from Idiot America

Welcome to your new Eden.

Welcome to Idiot America.

LET'S TAKE A TOUR, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn. James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically-elected president of Venezuela.

That isn't the begining of the article, because the begining might lull you into thinking this is just another poke at Intelligent Designers. In fact, it ranges through ID, faith-based politics, media, terrorism, Iraq, Katrina, and yes, even Bush is in there too.

It's a long interesting read, but only to those who probably already figured out what's wrong in this country. The simple premiss is that those who have long been relegated to the fringes of society for their lunatic ideas, have now taken the forefront, leading hordes of uneducated, easily manipulated masses. The dumbing-down of and to Americans, has resulted in a series of social conflicts beween reasoned intellect, and faith-based gut feelings. It demonstrates that at one time, we held scientific expertise in high esteem, but that today, everyone is accepted as an "expert", where all ideas, no matter how outragous and unprovable (or long proven wrong), are equal to proven facts. It blames us for having an attitude where thinking for ones self, is not a cherished passtime as much as it used to be.

I'm no historian, though I do consider lessons from the past of paramount importance, but I can think of no society throughout history, that benefitted from promoting ignorance over logic and reason. In fact, it usually signals the begining of a rapid decline that leaves a society open to a dark age for which it may never recover, if not reversed in time.