Hey Stupid!

Rick Shenkman is just the latest guy to set out to make a buck by telling us that we are stupid. So why should we pay to be insulted? Mostly, I suppose, because we assume that he must be talking about all those other guys, you know, the stupid ones. I have to confess that I like the epigraph to his excerpt linked above.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

So how is it that we are we stupid? Let me not count the ways, but mention and discuss a few:

"About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at least two members of the fictional cartoon family, according to a survey.

"The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms."

Art before politics, but can I just say that the question, as stated, is stupid. I would like Americans to know what freedoms are guaranteed by the Constitution, but there is no importance to what particular amendment it is guaranteed in. Nor is there any importance to being able to spout them off. I would be more impressed if the freedoms had been included in a true false list, e.g., the following freedoms are guaranteed by the Constitution, enter true or false for each: (a)Assembly, (b)Press, (c)right to keep pets, (d) Speech.

I'm by no means thrilled by my fellow citizen's erudition, but some of this guy's examples max out the needle on the lame-o-tron. Only 10% of us know what happened in 1066. Say what? A thousand years ago some limey caught an arrow in the eye thereby allowing one group of invading continental Europeans to take over the aristocracy of one small island nation from another group of previous continental invaders. Since that time there have been a few gazillion battles of conparable size and consequence on most of the continents.

Shenkman has real points too, though, notably Americans amazing confusion about government finances, Social Security, and similar matters.

The Republicans have been equally unctuous. While they have claimed that they are terribly worried about Social Security, they have been busy irresponsibly spending the system's surplus on tax cuts, one cut after another. First Reagan used the surplus to hide the impact of his tax cuts and then George W. Bush used it to hide the impact of his cuts. Neither ever acknowledged that it was only the surplus in Social Security's accounts that made it even plausible for them to cut taxes.

Take those Bush tax cuts. Bush claimed the cuts were made possible by several years of past surpluses and the prospect of even more years of surpluses. But subtracting from the federal budget the overflow funds generated by Social Security, the government ran a surplus in just two years during the period the national debt was declining, 1999 and 2000.

In the other years when the government ran a surplus, 1998 and 2001, it was because of Social Security and only because of Social Security. That is, the putative surpluses of 1998 and 2001, which President Bush cited in defense of his tax cuts, were in reality pure fiction. Without Social Security the government would have been in debt those two years. And yet in 2001 President Bush told the country tax cuts were not only needed, they were affordable because of our splendid surplus.

Today, conservatives argue that the Social Security Trust Fund is a fiction. They are correct. The money was spent. They helped spend it.

To this debate about Social Security -- which, once one understands what has been happening, is actually quite absorbing -- the public has largely been an indifferent spectator. A surprising 2001 Pew study found that just 19% of Americans understand that the United States ever ran a surplus at all, however defined, in the 1990s or 2000`s. And only 50% of Americans, according to an Annenberg study in 2004, understand that President Bush favors privatizing Social Security. Polls indicate that people are scared that the system is going bust, no doubt thanks in part to Bush's gloom-and-doom prognostications. But they haven't the faintest idea what going bust means. And in fact, the system can be kept going without fundamental change simply by raising the cap on taxed income and pushing back the retirement age a few years.

How much ignorance can a country stand? There have to be terrible consequences when it reaches a certain level. But what level? And with what consequences, exactly? The answers to these questions are unknowable. But can we doubt that if we persist on the path we are on that we shall, one day, perhaps not too far into the distant future, find out the answers?

The thing is, the American public is not totally responsible for its ignorance and confusion. The fact is that much of our so-called news media is mainly dedicated to spreading lies and distortions about all of the above. When they aren't doing that they are distracting us with idiotic stories of police chases, missing blond girls, and similar fare.