Is this a politician who could actually be taken seriously? Even if he doesn't mean it, and I'm sure he doesn't, he's saying something that really needs to be said about our modern democracy, which has devolved into rule-by-catchphrase. From Sen. Chuck Hagel on the floor of the Senate:
The war in Iraq is the defining issue on which this Congress and the administration will be judged. The American people want to see serious debate about serious issues from serious leaders. They deserve more than a political debate. This debate should transcend cynical attempts to turn public frustration with the war in Iraq into an electoral advantage. It should be taken more seriously than to simply retreat into focus-group tested buzz words and phrases like "cut and run," catchy political slogans that debase the seriousness of war.
The degree to which our entire political discourse has been taken over by the tools of marketing and public relations, with market-tested catchphrases designed to evoke the maximum emotional response and shut off all further thought is really the most important subject. It's something an educated citizenry wouldn't stand for.
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It's something an educated citizenry wouldn't stand for.
If only we had an educated citizenry. The problem is that it is way to easy to use pure marketing strategy - the body politic has always been based, in part, on marketing. It's disgusting and denegrates democracy. But as many are quik to mention when I talk about breaking the republican/democratic stranglehold on our country, good bloody luck. I am not saying it is a fight that should be dropped because we won't win. But it will take generations at least to get politicians to quit being politicians and just fu***** represent us.
But, of course, as you're not-so-subtly pointing out, we don't *have* an educated citizenry. There's a large portion of the citizenry that takes great *pride* in being uneducated, rather than joining the "intellectual elites".
Does anyone have any idea of where this perverse attitude comes from, by the way? It can't be just envy - if you envy something that someone else has, you try to obtain it for yourself. This bizarre reverse snobbery is just self-destructive.
One thing I *do* know - if it didn't exist, political demagogues would have to invent it (not that I think they could - something like this can only come from the grass roots), but as things stand they just take advantage of it. It's so much easier to inflame the emotions than to convince the mind, and the ignorant are easy to fool. Maybe that's why so much "educational reform" amounts to nothing more than lip service.
And Ed, I know that your opinion of the Big Two parties is essentially "a plague o' both your houses", but you have to admit that an uneducated populace is of greater benefit to the official party of the American Religious Right.
Back in the 60's and 70's it was called anti-intellectualism. Those Ivy-league egghead professors and their commie inspired anti-American ideas. It was colleges where anti-Vietnam (=anti-USA) sentiment was expressed most strongly, by profs and by students thought spoiled by their rich parents and basically only in university to dodge the draft as the real American boys could not, and wouldn't if they could. It was widely thought after Kent State in 1970 that the students were only getting what they deserved.
Today its not Vietnam of course, but the LIBERAL agenda, which is pervasive, all powerful and all evil. So powerful that the Conservatives own the executive and both houses in the legislature is hardly a check. Professors (probably atheists) are trying to force liberal so-called science like evolution when anyone with any common sense can see its obviously wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with perusing Answers in Genesis with no background in science whatever, then walking right up to a biologist and calling him a liar based on those readings. There is no rebuttle he can make. Global warming is obviously another liberal science, not really science at all. Any bricklayer or secretary can prove that. Its just common sense.
"There is absolutely nothing wrong with perusing Answers in Genesis with no background in science whatever, then walking right up to a biologist and calling him a liar based on those readings."
this highlights what appears to be an insurmountable problem. there was a time when the town doctor/lawyer/banker was respected and turned to for advice on those few arcane questions that came up and for which they had unique insights, or at least the prospects for them. but most things (eg, crop rotation, where to dig wells, how to buy a good animal) were generally known - everyone was an "expert" in most relevant matters.
today, almost everything is arcane and almost everyone is ignorant of most things. so, we all routinely turn to "experts" for our insights. but in our opinion-rich culture, knowing who to turn to also becomes a skill - unfortunately, a somewhat difficult one that requires some a priori knowledge and at least a minimal facility with critical thinking. hence, we have a bit of a do-loop: the very ignorance that drives us to "experts" can include an inability to choose "experts" wisely. hence, the likes of fox, AiG, and integrity-challenged politicians as the go-to sources for a frighteningly large fraction of the public. add the charge of an "intellectual elite" spreading their lies from the liberal, godless, traitor-infested media-university complex and those go-to sources become irrefutable - the refutation inevitably comes from those "lying elitists" and thus are dismissed out-of-hand.
Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life provides some insight into the phenomenon. In part due to the circumstances of the country's founding, Americans have always been fixated on the immediately practical, and that's led to a disdain for putting effort into anything that isn't. There were also early attempts to reject anything that seemed like European tradition; for example, what do the widespread prohibitions on first-cousin marriages (which is a uniquely American thing), the Constitutional provisions barring the granting of titles of nobility and the holding of such titles by government officials, the "death tax," and the requirement that the President be a natural-born citizen all have in common? They're all aimed in large part at preventing the development of a native European-style hereditary aristocracy (and particularly at preventing the noble families of 18th-century Europe from establishing themselves here). To early/mid-19th-century American nativists, intellectual inquiry had too much "furriner" baggage.