But Here's a Rat's Ass

A former co-worker, a lovely person in many ways but nonetheless a fascist, shared this meme on Facebook today.

That's odd. Social Security, Medicare, public education, police (when they're doing their job), the fire department, the military (in principle -- and my friend is another one of those "Support Our Troops" people anyway), all kinds of public health service, disaster relief, public roads, public libraries -- do I need to go on? These are all government protecting and caring for us, giving a shit. It doesn't really matter whether a given politician cares or not, it's the government's job to protect and care for us -- "to promote the general Welfare," as it says in the preamble to the Constitution -- and it does that, quite a lot.

It could do more, I suppose, and do better what it already does. But Republicans and a lot of voters don't want it to. They want to get rid of government so that everyone who isn't rich can die. They expect the government to take care of them, but the GOP voters are surprised when it turns out that the guys they voted for don't give a shit about them, but only about the rich. They're deathly afraid that someone else - someone black, someone brown, someone slightly poorer than they are, an immigrant, a (gasp) undocumented immigrant -- might get something from the government, and in order to deny others they're perfectly willing to give up those benefits themselves. Archie Bunker was a perfect example of this mentality. Now he and his kind are reaping the whirlwind. But go on, Archie, support Donald Trump; do you think he gives a shit about you?

The Stupid Is Strong in This One

The Stupid is strong in this one, liked today on Facebook by a friend who ... well, probably I can't expect him to know any better.  My answer, which I posted as a comment, is that I'm fine with displaying the Ten Commandments in public, as long as it's the work of churches, synagogues, and private citizens.  Governments are another matter.  And people who try to confuse the issue, as many would-be theocrats do, are another matter as well.  I have to admit, though, that many of them don't know they're confusing the issue.  They clearly can't grasp the principles involved.  Even more dispiriting, neither can many of those who would oppose the public display of the Decalogue, or other public displays of piety by private citizens.  How to implement freedom of religion and the separation of church and state would be messy enough with the best will in the world, and unfortunately, many of the loudest kibitzers don't have the best will in the world.

The International Doublethink Olympics

Just a quickie for now.  I played around with the image a little to make it less unsafe for work.

One of my right-wing-loon acquaintances posted this to Facebook tonight.  This seemed out of touch with reality even for him.  His page or profile or timeline on Facebook is, of course, Facebook's.  (Just as this blog is not mine, but Blogger's.)  I've noticed that it seems to be the right-wingers who are most likely to pass around rumors that Facebook is going to start charging for access, and who demand that it be free.  It's not only crazy leftists who think that Information Wants To Be Free, who think that the world owes them a living (many of my right-wing acquaintances are on Social Security and Medicare, fittingly enough, and are among the 47% who don't pay Federal income taxes), or maybe they're just like two-year-olds, screaming "NO!" reflexively whenever they don't get their way.  They are outstandingly good at Doublethink, holding two (or more) contradictory beliefs in their minds at once.  Which may be why their activity on Facebook mostly consists of passing along memes like the one above: maybe they can't compose a sentence of their own while they're juggling Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare, You Kenyan Socialist! in their heads.

On the third hand, there's this post from Blogarach, who barely beat me to the idea (I'd been reading the same Glenn Greenwald piece he takes off from) and did better with it than I probably would have.  While it's legitimate to be concerned about government infringements of our civil liberties, few pay enough attention to the fact that more and more of our lives are controlled by corporations, which are not obliged to respect our privacy or our freedoms, and have no accountability.  This issue got some notice at the beginning of the Occupy movement, when people began to realize that there were fewer and fewer public spaces in New York City anymore: the parks have been largely taken over by corporations, who can be nice and let you share them if you're good, but are not really obligated to do it.  And if they don't like your looks or your behavior, they can chop off your head.

But who knows?  Maybe my loony friends are right to demand that big corporations give them everything for free.  But as the Teabaggers found out when they began sounding too populist and criticizing big business and finance, the corporate money that supported them tended to dry up.

A Slight Detour

I had a couple of ideas for posts today, which I still hope to get to, but I got sidetracked when my liberal law professor friend shared this on Facebook.

"Love it," she commented.  Not too surprisingly, I didn't, and told her so as directly as I could without descending to rhetorical homophobia.

My main point was that if Maddow's that smart, why she's so dumb?  She may well be more intelligent than those boys, but that only brings to mind Molly Ivins' deathless epithet, "smarter than a box of rocks."  (Or, to borrow Mim Udovich's evaluation of Camille Paglia, I think it's safe to say she's smarter than mayonnaise.)  She's a militarist jingo, and even on gay issues she doesn't bother to inform herself.  I wrote her off entirely when she shilled for Obama at Netroots Nation in 2010.  No doubt she did so entirely voluntarily.  (You cannot hope to bribe or twist / Thank God! the lib'rul journalist / But seeing what the woman'll do / Unbribed, there's no occasion to.)  But it discredits her as a professional journalist.

Plenty of right-wingers have college degrees.  Ronald Reagan got his bachelor's in economics and sociology.  As an undergraduate Bill O'Reilly was an honors student in history, and got an MA in broadcast journalism at Boston University.  I could go on, but why bother?

I could also point to Gore Vidal, who never went to college at all: he went from Philips Exeter Academy into the Navy, and then became a professional writer.  After prep school he educated himself.  And how about I.F. Stone, who started his own newspaper after he graduated from high school?  Oh, he did go back to college and earned a bachelor's degree (in Classical Languages) after he retired at the age of 63, but his real work was done without a BA.  He was worth a dozen government shills like Maddow.

My friend admitted that Maddow rants, but declared that Maddow didn't annoy her the way Limbaugh does.  Of course: and Limbaugh doesn't annoy a right-wing listener the way Maddow does.  My friend is a partisan, for all she denies it.  She said that at least Maddow hasn't shut herself off from learning, as she claimed Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh have; but that's not obvious to me.  She kept insisting that Maddow was smarter than the others -- that box of rocks again -- and that she detected no intelligence in them.  It's odd, but I've learned not to trust the subjective judgments of partisans very much.  It must be because I'm an ignorant college dropout who has shut himself off from learning.

I mentioned in passing my own lack of a BA, though of course my friend knew about that already.  "It didn't refer to you," she protested.  "You're not a newscaster." Well, yes it did refer to me, actually, even though she didn't have me in mind when she linked to it, because I am a dropout.  Remember the running gag in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, where the World War II aerial gunner Yossarian refuses to go on any more bombing missions?  "They're trying to kill me," he explains when pressed.  "They're trying to kill everybody," another gunner yells indignantly.  "What different does that make?" Yossarian counters.  The meme is just a smear of anyone who doesn't have a college degree, on the assumption that they are necessarily dumber than a Stanford alum and Oxonian like Rachel Maddow.  The existence of equally dishonest and irrational conservatives with degrees is ignored.  And since so many equally dishonest and irrational liberals also have degrees -- which was rubbed in my face many times this past election season -- it follows that the deciding factor is not a BA.  The meme, and my friend's love for it, is offensive, but more important, it's stupid.  It's a contemptible exercise in class snobbery.  And I hate being reminded that intelligent, highly-educated people can be that stupid and vicious.

Oh yeah, the headline of that meme refers to the importance of education, doesn't it?  I think that education is important and that everyone should have access to it.  But I'm also aware of its limitations, and the threat that educated people pose to the rulers of any society.  The more schooled people are, the more likely they are to identify with the ruling elites and their view of the world, however: Noam Chomsky likes to point out that people with more years of schooling were more likely than people with less schooling to support the Vietnam War, and to accept the US government line that we were defending South Vietnam against Communist aggression.  A major purpose of higher education is to acculturate students to elite values and perspectives, though this purpose took a hit after World War II when large numbers of non-elites used the GI Bill to go to college; many of those non-elites clung to their working-class, non-Anglo-Saxon perspective, so they've been under attack ever since.  But I admit, I begin to question the value of a college education when I see so many college graduates show themselves basically unaffected by it.

P.S. It's probably relevant to mention also the recent, much-touted poll which showed that while NPR listeners were better-informed than Fox News viewers, they still were nothing to write home about: NPR regulars correctly answered 38 percent of questions they were asked about US politics, compared to 25 percent for Fox fans.  Previous studies, before Fox News even existed, showed that the more people relied on broadcast news, the less they knew.  I'm sure all the CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS anchors were properly educated -- oops, no, Walter Cronkite was a college dropout, but Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, and Chet Huntley graduated.  David Brinkley and Harry Reasoner went to college but I can't find whether they graduated; perhaps they were anti-education moles in the media.

Dumb Humans Think Humans Getting Dumber

Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me referred today to a study that claims human beings aren't as intelligent as they used to be.  I'd seen it mentioned once last week, but forgot about it; after an online search I realized that it was getting a fair amount of attention, so I read some of the articles and decided it was something I wanted to write about.

First, though, go back to this unrelated (or is it?) story from last March.

Work by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and then-colleague Justin Kruger found that “incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas,” according to a report by Life’s Little Mysteries on the blog LiveScience.

“Very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.

What’s worse is that with incompetence comes the illusion of superiority.

The irony in that last sentence sails over the researchers' heads, of course.  Hold that thought as I proceed.

Back to the articles (two so far) published by Stanford geneticist Gerald Crabtree on diminishing human intelligence.  I did some looking around for more information; tried to find Crabtree's articles themselves, but though I found the journal online through the university, I couldn't find the articles themselves.  I'll keep looking.

But for now, none of the reports indicate that Crabtree presented any evidence that human intelligence is in fact decreasing. Here's a summary of his argument from the Daily Mail:

Based on calculations of the frequency with which deleterious mutations appear in the human genome and the assumption that 2,000 to 5,000 genes are required for intellectual ability, Dr Crabtree estimates that within 3,000 years, about 120 generations, we have all sustained two or more mutations harmful to our intellectual or emotional stability.

Also, recent findings from neuroscience suggest that genes involved in brain function are uniquely susceptible to mutations.

Dr Crabtree argues that the combination of less selective pressure and the large number of easily affected genes is eroding our intellectual and emotional capabilities.

There is, I admit, no evidence Crabtree could present on human intelligence in history, because we have no good measure of intelligence for humans today (or any definition of intelligence that would enable us to measure it), and even if we did, we are unable to apply those measures to people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.  So what Crabtree has here is at best a hypothesis that he can't test, nor has he any prospect of being able to test it.  (Readers who take IQ tests seriously might want to recall the Flynn Effect, a documented rise in IQ scores that has been observed since the beginning of IQ testing.  But again, there's no way to administer IQ tests to our cavedwelling forerunners.)  According to a New York Daily News story, "Crabtree estimated that within 3,000 years, humans will endure two or more mutations harmful to our intellectual and emotional stability." Now, there's a testable prediction -- all we have to do is wait three thousand years, and then Dr Crabtree can collect his Nobel Prize!

So how does Crabtree argue for a decline in human intelligence?  He uses a well-worn canard, that human beings have gone soft over the millennia because we don't have to dodge saber-tooth tigers anymore.  As this writer quotes him:

"Needless to say a hunter gatherer that did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died along with their progeny, while a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus," Crabtree explains.

Crabtree gets a point or two for mocking the people who think they're the smart ones, but that may be why this blogger -- Web Editor for the San Francisco Business Times -- isn't all that impressed.  Still, he does a good job on a much quoted passage from the paper:

"I would be willing to wager that if an average citizen of Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions," writes Crabtree (whose knowledge of Athenian history may not be quite as good as his obvious expertise in genetics -- he's chosen a date from the Dark Age in Greece, when writing was forgotten and "citizen" was a bit of a stretch, centuries before democracy, Pericles and his ilk -- ah, but I digress; read on, perhaps that's his point after all).

"We would be surprised by our time-visitor's memory, broad range of ideas and clear-sighted view of important issues. I would also guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues," he goes on.

He adds, "I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2,000 to 6,000 years ago."  So that's all right then.

I really must track down a copy of the paper, because I find it hard to believe that this drivel was published in a professional, peer-reviewed journal of genetics.  There's no science here, just speculation and fabulation: "I would be willing to wager ... We would be surprised ... I would also guess ..."  That and $2.50 will get you on the Metro.  It might fly on an Op-Ed page somewhere, but a scientist is supposed to give support for speculations, not just toss them out and treat them as fact.

It appears that Crabtree and his colleagues got their chronology mixed up in more serious ways. They place the peak of human intelligence before humans emerged from Africa, about 2 million years ago, with the long downhill slide following.  By two to six thousand years ago, most of those damaging mutations would have done their work.  There's no reason to believe that people who lived no more than six thousand years ago would be that different from people today -- but they would, on Crabtree's assumptions, be much more like us than they'd be like our shared African ancestors on the savannah.

The Daily Mail continued:

But the loss is quite slow, and judging by society's rapid pace of discovery and advancement, future technologies are bound to reveal solutions to the problem, Dr Crabtree believes.

He said: 'I think we will know each of the millions of human mutations that can compromise our intellectual function and how each of these mutations interact with each other and other processes as well as environmental influences.

'At that time, we may be able to magically correct any mutation that has occurred in all cells of any organism at any developmental stage.

'Thus, the brutish process of natural selection will be unnecessary.'

"Magically"?

There is a lot of question-begging going on here: one is that "intelligence" was a crucial factor in human survival.  It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to escape from saber-toothed tigers; many non-human species have done at least as well as we have in that area.  According to the San Francisco Business Times writer, Crabtree considers "building a house, washing the dishes and putting them away (yes, that's one of his examples), or surviving in the jungle" to be examples of high human intelligence in action.  He has an odd concept of intelligence.  Did our ancestors two million years ago wash dishes?  But again, surviving in the jungle and building shelter are not specifically human abilities.

The only criterion that really matters in natural selection is reproductive success, and human beings have done quite well at that -- too well, in many people's view.  Maybe "intelligence" isn't as vital to human evolution as we like to think.  The canard on which Crabtree builds his case, that Homo Sapiens spread all over the planet, in all kinds of hostile environments, by somehow escaping selective pressure, is an absurd misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection.  But it's a popular one. Someone posted this, linking to the Daily Mail article: "There's no longer survival of the fittest. Intelligence isn't necessary to simply survive."  Like many people this person misunderstands "survival of the fittest."  It doesn't mean fitness according to an abstract conception of superiority; it means fitness in a given environment, and has no meaning outside that environment.  In an environment where intelligence hindered reproductive success, less intelligence would be fitter and the environment would select for it.  If Crabtree were right, that would be exactly what has happened: as human beings became less intelligent, we became more successful.  (It wouldn't necessarily follow that lower intelligence was being selected for, of course.)  But whatever role intelligence played in human evolution -- and we don't really know what role it was -- intelligence of the same kind and level wasn't necessary for reproductive (and therefore evolutionary) success in most species.  This is so basic that I feel foolish spelling it out like this, but there it is.  Insofar as human activity has changed the environment, we have affected natural selection -- but we haven't bypassed it, let alone eliminated it or triumphed over it.  (For example, if our invention and use of antibiotics has led to the emergence of resistant strains of microbes, that's natural selection in action.  Scientists weren't trying to produce resistant strains; they were an unintended and unwelcome outcome of their work.)

The Independent quoted a grumpy geneticist on Crabtree's papers:

“At first sight this is a classic case of Arts Faculty science. Never mind the hypothesis, give me the data, and there aren’t any,” said Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London.

“I could just as well argue that mutations have reduced our aggression, our depression and our penis length but no journal would publish that. Why do they publish this?” Professor Jones said.

Notice that, contrary to Professor Jones, Crabtree isn't "Arts Faculty."  Like Jones, he's a geneticist, the head of a laboratory at Stanford Medical School that studies Developmental Genetics, Chemical Biology, and Chromatin Regulation. In fact it's usually faculty in the humanities who criticize this kind of biological reductionism.  As Mary Midgley wrote in Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985): 

The effect [of specialization] is to leave many of today’s physical scientists rather unpracticed in general thinking, and therefore somewhat naïve and undefended against superstitions which dress themselves up as science.  Creationism, for instance, cuts no ice at all with humanists and social scientists.  Nobody trained to think historically is in any danger of taking it seriously, least of all theologians.  It makes its academic converts  among chemists and physicists – sometimes, alarmingly enough, even among biologists [24].

But Jones is right that Crabtree doesn't seem to have any data aside from some irrelevant (at least, their relevance isn't evident) calculations of the frequency of malign but unknown mutations that might affect human intelligence.  There's nothing necessarily wrong with putting out untestable speculations, but they don't constitute confirmation or proof of anything.

So why do "they" publish this?  I wonder that myself.  But it's easy to see why it got so much attention.  The thesis is a popular one among social Darwinists, who like to think that the race has gone soft due to luxurious living, and the Stupid are inheriting the earth, instead of their own superior selves. Which takes me back to the quotation above: With incompetence comes the illusion of superiority.

It Was a Hot and Steamy Day

I was about to say that I don't feel like writing today, but that's not quite it.  I don't feel like thinking today, and writing a serious post requires thinking.

Of course I'm far from alone in this, though I may be rare in recognizing and admitting it.  A former IU student and current Facebook friend said yesterday that the US (and our allies, of course, he added) needs to occupy Pakistan to keep more trouble from erupting in that part of the world.  I replied a US invasion of Pakistan would make things worse, not better; indeed, US aggression is a major source of trouble in that part of the world.  I didn't say we should invade, he protested; I still haven't had the energy to reply that you can hardly have an occupation without an invasion first.  It's my liberal friends who keep reminding me of Molly Ivins's slap at some Texas pol, that if his IQ sank any lower we'd have to water him, and that's what makes me feel like shutting down my brain indefinitely.  I can muster more energy and enthusiasm for slapping down my right-wing friends' howlers -- one of them just reposted this cartoon this morning -- than the complacent babbling of the liberal ones.

So, having said that, let me just refer you to Ta-Nehisi Coates's fine article "Fear of a Black President," which includes these heartbreaking passages:

I asked [Shirley] Sherrod if she thought the president had a grasp of the specific history of the region and of the fights waged and the sacrifices made in order to make his political journey possible. “I don’t think he does,” Sherrod said. “When he called me [shortly after the incident], he kept saying he understood our struggle and all we’d fought for. He said, ‘Read my book and you’ll see.’ But I had read his book.”

And:

In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. “What will my babies say?,” Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. “How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?”

What makes it particularly awful is that Obama fired Sherrod based on the lies of the unlamented right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart, who was already known to be fraudulent.  Sherrod was fired by the first black president for no damn reason except his political cowardice.

Meanwhile, over at The Sideshow, Avedon quotes Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report, and comments:

Dixon recommends getting out of the two-party, lesser-evil box and preparing for something new. I don't know how to do that, but I do know that blacks and whites alike are "more unemployed than we've been in seventy years, and more imprisoned than we've ever been," and I'm horrified at every "progressive" who somehow thought it was more important to defend Obama's presidency than to defend the Democratic Party and the nation against this rightward push, to the point where even primary challenges to bad Democrats were out of the question. Paul Ryan and other Republican Horrors are people who the Democratic leadership actively protected against real challenges in their districts. The only reason there are any Republicans in Congress from New York is that the Democratic leadership makes sure that happens.

Dixon is right: The Republicans are giving the Obamacrats cover to pass a right-wing agenda. 

The True Pure Centrist commented that the trouble is that people don't know the good things that the Democrats have done: the New Deal, the Civil Rights Bills, Medicare, and so on.  I can't speak for everyone, but I'm fully aware of all Democratic conventions.  It's actually hard to be unaware of those things, because Democratic apologists keep reminding us about them.  So I doubt the general ignorance is as widespread as TPC likes to think.  The trouble is that the great accomplishments he mentions were made a couple of generations ago (Cthulhu, I'm old), and that the last two Democratic administrations have been doing their best to to undo those achievements.

Of course, there are always haters.  This ungrateful Negro, for example, just had to carp and complain and find fault even in the Democrats' glory days:

No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accomodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.

...

I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism every day.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 1969

It isn't we professional leftists who need to be reminded of what the Democrats did in the past: it is the Democratic mainstream that needs to take stock and stop trying to dismantle everything their predecessors (however half-heartedly) achieved.

In Soviet Russia, Rubik's Cube Solves YOU

Yesterday I checked out Like Shaking Hands with God (Seven Stories Press, 1999), a book of conversations about writing between Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. Boy, am I ever glad I didn't buy it, and all hail once more to public libraries, the training schools of socialism! I hadn't heard of Stringer before, but one small virtue of this one is that it pointed me toward his books. Vonnegut I've read, of course, and Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the books I will keep no matter how I whittle down my collection in years to come. But here he just embarrasses me.

I do like his remarks about literature as

the only art that requires our audience to be performers. You have to be able to read and you have to be able to read awfully well. You have to read so well that you get irony! I'll say one thing meaning another, and you'll get it. Expecting a large number of people to be literate is like expecting everybody to play the French horn. It is extremely difficult [17-18].

But even here he goes a bit too far. Yes, a reader is a performer, as Vonnegut says. But though reading is harder to learn than spoken language, most people can learn to do it well enough. A significant part of the problem is that reading is generally taught in school in such a way as to discourage students from learning to do it well. If you're just playing a rousing game of "Ain't It Awful," of course, such considerations are unimportant. I do expect large numbers of people to be literate, though "large numbers" and "literate" both need to be defined. And that's leaving aside the question of whether people only respond creatively to written texts: understanding oral performance (which long predates the invention of writing and the spread of literacy beyond small elite groups) also involves complex skills of decoding and meaning-making.

What really annoyed me was this excerpt from Vonnegut's book Timequake, which was read aloud the evening this conversation took place:

A Luddite to the end ... I persist in pecking away at a manual typewriter. That still leaves me technologically several generations ahead of William Styron and Stephen King, who, like [Vonnegut's character Kilgore] Trout, write with pens on yellow legal pads.

I correct my pages with pen or pencil. I have come into Manhattan on business. I telephone a woman who has been doing my retyping for years and years now. She doesn't have a computer, either [40].

"Telephone"?! A true Luddite would write a letter with a quill pen, and dispatch it by messenger, who would wait for any reply and bear it back. Preferably on foot -- none of these newfangled 'railroads', as I believe the young people call them. He goes on to talk about sending some pages to his typist by post, using an envelope. An envelope, for heaven's sake -- a true Luddite would simply fold the ms. and seal it with wax and his personal seal. A gentleman has a personal seal, cuts his own quills, and grinds his own ink.

Vonnegut goes on to talk about the importance of face-to-face dealings with people, and I'm with him there. (So is Samuel Delany, who also discussed the importance of such contact at about the same time in his Times Square Red, Times Square Blue [NYU Press, 1999].) At the post office,

I put the waiting time to good use. I learn about stupid bosses and jobs I will never have, and about parts of the world I will never see, and about diseases I hope I will never have, and about different kinds of dogs people have owned, and so on. By means of a computer? No. I do it by means of the lost art of conversation [44].

I hadn't noticed that the art of conversation was lost. (To lose one art might be accounted a misfortune... But now that I think about it, gossiping in a queue, as fine a pastime as it is, isn't what is usually meant by "the art of conversation.") Vonnegut should have looked in the pockets of his other pair of pants, I know that's where I always find misplaced items. But technology hasn't a lot to do with that issue. As his admission about Styron and King shows, Vonnegut is aware that Luddism is relative. He uses advanced technology when it suits him, like his typewriter and telephone. And though I have a computer, and I even used a fax machine yesterday, I still value face-to-face dealings with people, as do all the younger people I know. Technology is often an excuse for shutting oneself away, rather than a reason; people became recluses long before Facebook.

As the poet Adrienne Rich once wrote: "Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around."

Which reminds me, Dennis Baron has an interesting new post at his Web of Language blog, "Computers Remember So You Don't Have To." He begins by describing studies which show that people who rely on computers and the Internet tend not to remember the information they get there.

More and more we’re saying to ourselves, “Why bother memorizing the names of the Oscar-nominated movies for 1939 when I can just look them up on IMDb?” Or, as the psychologists put it, “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”

Familiar so far, but instead of indulging in a technophobic rant, Baron continues:

But this is not surprising. Relying on an external database is nothing new: before digitized contacts files there were address books; before IMDb there were Leonard Maltin books. Before Wikipedia there were analog encyclopedias. And before Google there were librarians. As the experimenters acknowledge, humans have always recognized the role of individual expertise: we quickly learn who to ask for the best recipe, the most-accurate directions, the conversion from Fahrenheit to centigrade. That way we don't have to remember everything.

And for that matter, we don't have to memorize a lot of recipes because they're in the cookbook. We don't have to memorize the music we play on instruments because we have systems of notation that let us write it down. I've always had trouble remembering how to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade, even before computers, but that was because I so seldom had to do it. If I'd done it more, I'd have memorized it. I remember the birthdays of all three of my brothers and my niece, but after a few years BC (Before Computers) trying to work out a system on index cards, I keep track of the birthdays of my far-flung friends on my computer. Bitch about it if you like, but using such tools enables me to remember more birthdays than I could have done otherwise. My friends generally seem pleased when I send birthday greetings, and none have complained so far that I do by e-mail instead of sending a handwritten note in black ink on creamy white notepaper by manservant.

Baron then quotes Plato from the Phaedrus:

This invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

So, you see, it all started with writing. Or maybe it started when we first started covering our bodies with artificial skin so that we could live in colder climates, or when we began making stone tools instead of using our natural, god-given teeth to rip and tear. Back to the Stone Age! Back to the days before the Stone Age, when we weren't isolated and dehumanized by technology!

Satire, Meet Reality; Try Not to Laugh Too Hard

I want to stress again that I don't think things are necessarily any worse than they were in the good old days, at least in some areas. People have always been insane. Still, certain things do make me want to bang my head against the wall and howl in despair.

For example, some students at a middle school in Arkansas included a list of the 5 Worst People in All Time in their yearbook: Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Charles Manson, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney. Of course, these lists are easy to quibble with. Where's Stalin? Where's Richard Nixon? Where's Mao Zedong? Henry Kissinger? Arguably any of them is worse than Charles Manson.

But as I'm sure you'll have guessed, the hissyfits inspired by this list were over Bush and Cheney.

Parents were outraged when they discovered the list, according to the station, and, in reaction, the school district had the list covered with black duct tape.

Superintendent Randall Williams says the printing of the list was "an oversight," Fox 16 reports, and said he was disappointed to learn the tape could simply be peeled off the page.

Duct tape? And the Superintendent is surprised to learn that the tape can be peeled off? How is it that every adult in Russellville hasn't been declared mentally incompetent and placed under guardianship?

"I'm furious as a parent and as a board member and as a tax payer and as a resident of Russellville," School Board Member Chris Cloud, who has two children in the district, tells the station. "It's wrong."

Of course Fox News can't do more than generate soundbytes, but why does Mr. Cloud think that "it" (whatever it is) is "wrong"? As a taxpayer, I'm furious that this sort of tempest in a teapot is happening in a supposedly free country, though as an informed person I know that it's nothing new. Political Correctness has run amuck!

Williams tells Fox 16 the yearbook sponsor -- a teacher -- is "very, very, very" upset that she didn't pay more attention to the page with the list, and that the yearbook editing process is being reviewed. "I think she maybe just scanned the whole page and went on," he tells the station, adding that he can't talk about disciplinary action.

That doesn't mean there won't be disciplinary action, of course. Someone has to pay for making trouble. You don't go to school to learn to stick out in a crowd.

I don't believe that anyone -- anyone who mattered, I mean -- would have objected if an equally meaningless but more Truely Politically Correct list had appeared in the yearbook. But why doesn't anyone talk back to Chris Cloud and his gang? I sympathize with the superintendent, who can't reasonably be expected to jeer at the school board. But if anyone in Russellville has a different view, their Fair and Balanced news station didn't bother to inform us. And just because it's Arkansas doesn't mean everybody is a Teabagger.

Then Eric Alterman had to remind me how much Stupid there is on what we laughingly call the American Left. His current blog post at the Nation is called "Stupid Is", and he doesn't notice the backwash. The post is dedicated to touting his own latest column, on the idiocy of Republicans, and then "If the recent news of stubbornly high unemployment claims, weakening jobs reports, a re-imploding housing picture, and softening manufacturing activity didn’t convince you that both our country and President Obama’s chances for reelection are teetering on the brink of disaster ..." You see? Obama's reelection and the future of Our Country are inseparable.

As for those Republican idiots:

One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans—around half—are complete idiots. And the candidates who wish to be elected by them must pander to them, either by being idiots themselves—see “Bachmann, Michele”—or pretending to be. Nobody in the MSM is empowered to say this aloud. Indeed, the very act of pointing it out brands one a “liberal elitist” who is biased against proud, patriotic conservatives.

He follows this up with some poll results showing the crazy things that Republicans believe. And there's no doubt about it, they're crazy things. But what about the crazy things that Democrats believe?



I've written about this video before:

“I would like to see a cleaner earth for my child that I’m bringing into the world very soon,” says one smiling young woman. “It’s time for change,” a serious young white man agrees, “I want a better future for my children.” “I would like our environment to be safe,” an elegant African American woman adds. “Someone to actually make a difference in my generation,” says a white man with close-cropped hair and what appears to be a bruised eye, wearing a bomber jacket and hoodie. “I would like to see us in a world without fear,” says a man with his arm around a smiling woman. “Basically, um, I just want the war to end,” says a young Latina who earlier assured the viewer that “Esto es nuestro America.” The expectant mother returns with “I would like the rest of the world to think highly of our amazing country.” Also I’d like an Xbox, a Hannah Montana DVD, and a Cabbage Patch doll, okay? … If I were going to satirize this video, I’d show Obama dressed in work clothes, shuffling and scraping as he pushed a broom, mumbling, “Yes’m, I’ll clean up the earth for you right away, ma’am. A world without fear, suh, comin’ right up!”

Obama has not only failed to deliver on these fantasies (which is not unreasonable), but has delivered a third Bush term instead (which is very unreasonable) and has attacked and laughed at his Democratic critics. (His right-wing critics, however, he takes very seriously, and his response to them is careful, measured, and civil.) Yet his approval ratings currently hover around 50 percent for the whole population, but among Democrats, it is 82 percent; among liberals, 76 percent. Consider what that means: the economy is still in trouble (except for the richest), we are still waging wars in at least three countries depending on what you consider a war, the Patriot Act was just renewed without debate, and so on, but a very large majority of Democrats think Obama's doing a good job. Some presumably know what he's doing and approve of it, others presumably believe that he's still working on that Xbox for next Christmas and would have brought about a world without fear if it weren't for those rascally Republicans. Numerous Obama apologists point to his good poll numbers among Democrats and liberals as evidence (or proof) that the God-King is doing a good job; what those numbers actually indicate is that substantial majorities of Democrats and liberals are delusional.

Between the Republicans and the Democrats, that's a lot of Stupid. What can be done about it, I don't know. I'm not sure anything can be done.