The Growing American Hostility To Knowledge
This from Patricia Cohen writing for The New York Times touches on a sense of things that has bothered me for some time, but was not sure how much of it was simply my own limited perceptions. Unfortunately, the condition seems to have been noticed by others, as well.
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she [Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason”] said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”
We’re doomed.
Rick Shenkman follows up with his report “How Ignorant Are We?”
Looks like the answer is unfortunately pretty ignorant.
on July 16th, 2008 at 10:11 am
I gotta tell you this sounds like a book for me. It is amazingly shocking how ignorant the American people are. Don’t bother me with the facts that’s to complicated. Just give me a cadidate I can drink a beer with and who won’t take my guns. I’m being sarcastic of course. But dem,s aren’t gonna take your guns. They never have to this point and there not going to. That is a tactic to scare the middle class away from voting democratic. And by the way there isn’t many people that I’ve drank beer with that I want making major decisions. It’s idiotic that people think this way and fall for this crap. People who are misinformed and of course the wealthy are shaping this country by voting in evil and I do mean evil. Just look at GWB. It will be fifty years probably before we can fix his mess. His own party knows he’s an idiot and shameless. But I guess the American people hadn’t ate enough shit up to the last election so let’s hope they’ve had enough now. Sorry for the rant but I wanted to comment on the book. Hopefully I get to read it sometime.