...web comments are really fucking depressing. But so are calls into a lot political call-in shows. One show on C-Span whose name I forget, I watched it, thinking the audience must be a fairly liberal, bookish sort, like what I imagine an NPR or PBS audience to be -- everyone who called in was a flaming political idiot and the majority of their stuff was of a conspiracy-theory type nature. That was the dominant theme: Conspiracy theory: UN, Federal Reserve, secret elites plotting to make us into one-world government types of theories. Like the old militia movement and John Birch lines.
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About this, our own Michael Yates wrote in July:
This is a land tailor-made for conspiracy theories and strange beliefs. These serve as a a substitute for thinking clearly, yet give their adherents the feeling that they have an inside track on things. Karen and I have concluded that we live in a nation of “bar talk;” everyone is an expert on everything, like the guy who won’t shut up on the barstool next to yours. There is no respect for real learning or an appreciation of the effort it takes to understand things. No doubt diehard fundamentalist religious beliefs function in a similar manner. As substitutes for thinking. I know from my many years of teaching undergraduates that the typical U.S. college graduate must certainly be the least knowledgeable in the world. The right-wingers rail against all the left-wingers on campus, but they have little to worry about. In the United States thoughtlessness rules, and bar talk is king. And in the meantime, the rich keep getting rich, with wealth that would have put john D. Rockefeller to shame.
They flaunt their riches like the robber barons of yore.
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