by Frank Dwyer
from The Huffington Post
In a recent post, "Nitwit News," Joan Z. Shore attempts to understand why the American people are so happily inundated with "human interest" stories--Barbaro's euthanization, the love-crazed astronaut, the cautionary saga of Anna Nicole Smith--while real news, important news, news essential to the proper functioning of our democracy, is ignored. (She might also have wondered why it took us a week to get Gerald Ford properly interred.)
"Why," she asks, "are we, the audience, enthralled by this dribble?"
The answer is very depressing: because that's the kind of people we are.
We watch loudmouthed, ignorant, rude, mean-spirited television--O'Reilly and Hannity and Beck and Grace and Idol and all the other dribble and drivel--because that's the kind of people we are.
We watch vulgar and stupid movies without even noticing how vulgar and stupid they are. Because that's the kind of people we are. (No one in Little Miss Sunshine's family had ever seen her rehearse or perform her talent routine, so how would they know--until they saw her on stage at the competition--that her grandfather had merely taught her to bump and grind? Right. Academy Award!)
Look how we vote. Look what the politicians and their flacks do and say to win those votes. Look how they lie to us and cheat us, with impunity. Look how much damage we've done in the world. Look how the rest of the world despises us.
We are, basically, a stupid people.
Are we newly stupid? No, but we used to be generous, too (more or less; not counting slavery and the Trail of Tears and lynching and segregation), we used to be decent and kind (basically), we used to be good-hearted. Is there anything more impressively generous and good-hearted in history than the Marshall Plan? But that was a while ago. We aren't Marshall Plan people any more. We're the kind of people who bank our tax cuts and hope for more while our soldiers and their families scrounge for armor and equipment. We're the kind of people who re-elect the leaders responsible for that, instead of draping them over lampposts.
Why? Why are we this way? Well, we don't like taxes. We like tax cuts! Yeah! We like hearing about Anna Nicole! We like voting for the one we'd most like to have a beer with! Yeah! We like seeing people win prizes by eating bugs! We like seeing people humiliated on Idol! And what tiny minority of us could possibly think anything a nerdy wonk like Douglas Feith once did or said could compare in any way to the richly entertaining and urgent importance of Britney Spears shaving her head?
Democracy doesn't work when the people are stupid, in Baghdad or Gaza or Main Street, USA.
We're over.
My personal footnote is that we've somehow managed to elevate those things that are merely interesting to the level of important while rendering those things that are important to be merely interesting.
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