The Government They Deserve

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Matt Taibbi has a new book out, Griftopia, all about the Tea Party. There is an excerpt available at AlterNet that is worth a read.  This sums it up pretty well:

By rallying behind dingbats like Palin and Michele Bachmann -- the Minnesota congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted global warming wasn�t a threat because "carbon dioxide is natural" -- the Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism itself a rallying cry. The Tea Party is arguing against the very idea that it�s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics.

Bachmann is the perfect symbol of the Dumb and Dumber approach to high finance. She makes a great show of saying things that would get a kindergartner busted to the special ed bus -- shrieking, for instance, that AmeriCorps was a plot to force children into liberal "reeducation camps" (Bachmann�s own son, incidentally, was a teacher in an AmeriCorps program), or claiming that the U.S. economy was "100 percent private" before Barack Obama�s election (she would later say Obama in his first year and a half managed to seize control of "51 percent of the American economy").

When the Chinese proposed replacing the dollar as the international reserve currency, Bachmann apparently thought this meant that the dollar itself was going to be replaced, that Americans would be shelling out yuan to buy six-packs of Sprite in the local 7-Eleven. So to combat this dire threat she sponsored a bill that would "bar the dollar from being  replaced by any foreign currency."

So we have not only a citizenry of morons but the morons are finding their way to Washington.  How did we get here?  In 2006 a Gallup report indicated the over 50% of Americans did not believe in Evolution.  It would be easy to blame the Religious Right and the right wing media but I think it the problem has it's origins much earlier.  I raised two sons who attended public school in the 80s and early 90s.  We lived in a middle and upper middle class community primarily made up of baby boomer professionals.  The boys schooling went well until high school.  My oldest son had a problem with algebra - his math teacher said he was not receptive.  Since I was an engineer I had a working knowledge of the subject and was not only able to teach him what his math teacher couldn't but found him to be a very receptive student.  My youngest son was a voracious and great reader.  He loved history.  When he was very young I would read to him at night before he went to sleep and it was history that he wanted to read.  Much to my amazement when he got into college we discovered he was unable to write.  He could write but had little knowledge of grammar or sentence construction.  I was able to correct that in a few short weeks - another receptive student.  It's easy to beat up on teachers and the public school system but I noticed something else.  The parents of my son's friends - boomer professionals like me - were horrible parents, that is to say they had little time to be parents.  They spent little time with their children and a family sit down meal was rare to non existent.  The values and knowledge of the parents was not passed on to the children.  And keep in mind we are not talking about a low income area with uneducated parents - just the opposite.  Those students of the 80s and the 90s are today's teachers.  They have little knowledge of US history or the Constitution.

Given the above is it really surprising we now live in a country that is simply too dumb for democracy?

Note:  My two sons turned out just fine.  One is a sensible conservative and the other a liberal like mom and dad.