Sometimes – and this is one of them – I have to ask trite, obvious, redundant, and rhetorical questions.
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What the fuck is wrong to this country? Actually, I retract the claim that this is rhetorical. Someone tell me. Please. What the fuck happened to us?
Buried in today's "headlines" about the "MySpace suicide," NFL player Sean Taylor's funeral, and "Why Bad Kissers Don't Get to Second Base" (thanks CNN!) is an afterthought about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capability. It has been released for public consumption today but was completed almost a year ago. It concludes that Iran abandoned its weapons program…in 2003.
Now, what are the odds that no one in the White House knew about the content of this report almost a year ago? Let's be generous and call it one in 600 billion. OK. So. While this is only recently available to the public it has been well known to people like, oh, let's say the President and the Secretary of State, for a year.
That means, and stop me when I fall off the logic train, that the past 7 months of We Must Invade Iran saber-rattling and up-ramping has been done with full knowledge that not a shred of the "nuclear program" allegations were true.
I'm sorry, but since when is "President and entire administration knowingly lie to America and the world in an attempt to justify invading another country" not news?
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No Flashing Breaking News Alerts, no headlines, no "Gee America, looks like we have nearly red-handed evidence that your entire executive branch are lying, warmongering cocksuckers" commentary, and no pointed, incisive questions. The talk radio crowd don't even bother to make excuses for it. It's just not even relevant. No one notices, no one cares. It's the 5th most urgent news item of the day.
We often succumb to the temptation to idealize the past in this country, but the part of my psyche that doesn't resist urges very well thinks that this would not be the case in 1950.
Or 1960. Or 1970. Hell, probably not even in 1980. But not in 2007. The President getting caught red-handed trying to bullshit the country into another pre-emptive "security" war is not news.
I often think there has been some sort of fundamental and irrevocable change in this country, an intellectual point-of-no-return that we breezed past in the mid-80s. Stories like this do not discourage me from thinking that more regularly. We're officially a nation of vacuous, disinterested idiots. Willfully ignorant. Proud of it. As anti-intellectual as we are intellectually incurious. In short, we as a nation operate at about a 4th grade level – our interest in the "news" essentially encompasses sports, movies, Top 40 music, and medical oddities.
I don't know what the hell is wrong with me, or anyone else who chooses to teach for that matter. It's like we're signing up to be the Designated Mourners for 40 years of progressively more depressing batches of young people.
Chris says:
I hope the reason nobody is alarmed by the whole "Iran"
thing is people feel like they can't do anything about Bush, are so sick of him it hurts to look at or hear about him, and are just waiting for his term to run out. The 2006 elections didn't do anything because there aren't enough Democrats to override Bush's veto. I don't see a massive protest happening soon, and what good is complaining after eight years.
One thing is for sure: January 20, 2009 can not come soon enough, and the world shall party hard that day.
Peggy says:
[hands Ed a piece of sackcloth and some ashes]
Today one of my students suggested that it would be REALLY FUN to have a "stereotypes day," where we all dress up like different cultural stereotypes. I'm hoping he'll show up in blackface, so I can throw him in my trunk, drive him over to a nearby nonwhite majority public school (several in the area to choose from) and drop him off by the flagpole at 3:15. I'm pretty convinced that in the case of this particular kid, nothing short of an impressively severe beating will get any sense into his head.
Brandon says:
Hehe…sometimes it's fun to rant! I hope that was a cathartic experience, Ed. Sadly, though, I can't really take issue with anything you said…
Matthew says:
The nice thing about working in publishing is that it doesn't matter to us whether anybody actually reads our books, so long as they buy them.
So you know, as long as the anti-intellectualism of the U.S. is balanced with its uber-consumerism, I'm set.
JDryden says:
On a small, candle-in-the-dark note of optimism, I was teaching "The Second Coming" last week, and one of my students said, appropos of nothing, "This is the most relevant poem we've read this entire semester. It's like he's writing it *now*." And the entire room nodded. They *get* it; they just don't know what to *do* about it. It's the "Daily Show phenomenon," where people of a certain age trust a satire to be more honest than 'the News', because they recognize the essential mendacity/vacuity of the latter.
But Chris is right in that there's a sense of futility and despair–we are essentially leaderless, and the Congress that moved to impeach Nixon is long dead, replaced by a Congress who made a joke out of impeachment with the Clinton circus, which was replaced by a Congress who won't move to impeach because they'll just get accused of 'playing gotcha-politics', and they're too stoneless to take that heat. All of which creates a national mood that makes Carter's infamous 'malaise' look like the Roaring '20s.
sarah cb says:
after the climate change unit in my class, with all the readings, lectures, discussions, and exercises about different aspects of the scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change, my students STILL regularly post comments on the online forum saying that scientists disagree and climate change is not "proven." i also have a few students who like to talk about how the government has no right to limit the emissions of "individuals." about this last claim, i can only assume that they are referring to the things that they emit out their backsides and post on the online forum.
jk says:
yeah that news was crazy! At least on nytimes.com it was the headline.
I agree with everybody–I was shocked to hear it, but then I realized that I half-expected it, and probably everyone else did too, so everybody is so sick of hearing their most pessimistic thoughts coming true that they can't devote mental energy to being shocked, so the malaise sets in without any closure to the anger. That is too emotionally tiring.
I remember how I felt when we invaded Iraq–I thought it was a horrible idea and that we would pay for it later. Then came "Mission Accomplished" on the carrier and I thought to myself, "Am I wrong?" It bothered me for a while because I was calling into question my whole judgment and didn't know what to believe since the media were complicit in the invasion, no asking if we should be dong this. And in the end the 'nightmare with no end in sight' actually gives me a bittersweet sense of personal triumph that I knew it all along.
This 3-part story of disbelief, then denial and questioning, then personal redemption is exactly the same with Iran too. At first I disbelieved that these backward Iranians had nukes, then the media accepted it as truth for years, then finally it comes out that it is all a sham and the only positive thing is my small sense of achievement.
-h says:
Backward indeed. jk, don't tell me that if the Media jumped off a cliff, you would follow. If you do, I suggest you go backwards – it's not as scary that way. Trust me, I know, I'm a backward Iranian.
Ed, thanks for the post – it had been many weeks since I had gone online (in a sad attempt to block out the depressing war drums). After this latest news came out, ginandtacos was my first stop back onto the web.
I'll admit though, ignorance IS a little like bliss… I can now kinda understand this whole anti-intellectualism thing.
Christina says:
Seen the Naomi Wolff You Tube yet (or read her newest book)?
Read Conservatives Without Conscience?
Those'll explain it.
jk says:
Any culture that treats females worse than men is backwards. that does not exclude the US.