If I had a hammer ... I might still use a screwdriver
Countezero said:
I can't accept much of your critique due to the reality that the American electorate is better educated and has more access to information about its government and its public officials than at any other time in history. And yet, the quality of our government and the quality of those doing the governing seems to be in decline. . .
I hear what you're saying, but the fact that the American electorate has better access to information, or even that they are more educated, doesn't necessarily translate into practice. To wit, in school the most common phrase I ever heard about myself from teachers is that I didn't "apply myself". In this case, I didn't do my homework. That I was allegedly smart made no difference in my grades, as I wasn't using that alleged intelligence the way the school intended.
Likewise, the fact that something is a hammer doesn't mean someone knows how to use it. That they know how to use it doesn't mean they
will actually use it. And I've had that conversation before:
"Why are you hammering that in with a screwdriver handle?"
Where's the hammer?
"Downstairs on the shelf above the dryer."
Oh. (Resumes hammering with screwdriver handle.)
I was over at a cousin's house today, attending to their autistic son. While I was there, his older brother came through on his way to work. We talked for a bit, and the young man is certainly politically engaged. But I still wonder where the hell he's getting his information. They have cable, a newspaper subscription, and a wi-fi network in the house, yet I had trouble understanding anything he was saying. Despite the information availability in their house, this young voter had no clue about the facts asserted in the mainstream public discourse, or the actual facts of the situations he was discussing. If, for instance, you can coherently connect Sarah Palin to the 2012 apocalypse to health care in the context that no doctors are actually interested in the health of their patients, you're doing better than I am. Really, he's a nice kid, but absolutely clueless despite having better access to information than I do. (I have the internet; no cable news, no daily paper. He also has a closer branch of a better library system than I do.)
The thing is that he's young; his priorities are elsewhere. He cares enough about certain issues to have opinions, but not enough to take the time to learn about them. Right now he worries about getting to work on time and impressing his girlfriend. I wouldn't fault him for this,
per se; he's just an example.
And I've seen it many, many times over the years. I've known plenty of people who had opinions about things and, despite their access to information, a lack of knowledge about their chosen issues.
It's like I said about the Voter's Guide and the Bible. Brief examples: I was once discussing an upcoming election with a couple of friends while we smoked bowls and downloaded tunes. Two of us started talking about a state race, I think for Commissioner of Public Lands. There was a candidate we were both prepared to back because he had this awesome reforestation plan that would position the state to corner, of all things, the
baseball bat market. It was hilarious; we had a well-educated candidate with a good track record who supported marijuana legalization and wanted to dedicate a half-million acres of public reforestation to a certain kind of tree to make baseball bats. As state races go, this was one of the coolest things we'd heard in ages. And we were talking about it and laughing our asses off, and our other friend suddenly chimed in: "What are you talking about?" So we explained. "Where did you hear about this?" I pointed out it was in the Voter's Guide. "I never read it," she said. So I grabbed the copy sitting atop my stereo, found the page, showed it to her, and called up the guy's website. I mean, a Voter's Guide and a campaign web page aren't exactly
deep research, right? But those two things constituted more effort than she had ever put into a vote.
Or the Bible. Imagine a devout Christian in her late sixties. A traditional "proper" wife whose focus is homemaking and community. And she often talks about her Bible studies. Yet one day, she starts off about Communism, and I pointed out the bit in the fourth chapter of Acts about how the first generation of apostles after Christ lived communally. She had no idea, apparently, that this passage existed. It flabbergasted her. And she came back with a couple of Old Testament citations, and a New Testament bit that recalled those older passages; they were well and fine, as Bible passages go, but they didn't do anything to contradict the passage from Acts. They were about the importance of work as a community asset, which sounds vaguely Communist to me.
Or a Biblically-derived argument against homosexuality. The whole "lifestyle choice" thing? I've raised a particular link about that here many times before. I pointed out to a devout Christian I know that it seemed odd that God would forgive one lifestyle sin while condemning another.
"What do you mean?"
Well, take your Mom for instance. She got divorced and remarried.
"Yeah?"
In a Christian church.
"Yes. What does that have to do with anything?"
It's not allowed.
"Says who?"
Jesus.
"Where?"
Luke.
"Really?" (Looks it up.)
And, yet, the thing is that this sort of thing—
"Every one who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery."
(Luke 16.18, RSV)
—doesn't make much of a difference to those particular advocates, anyway. Still, though, it's something that would seem to me of some importance to Christians. I mean, being the words of Christ, and all.
The question might thus arise as to how people missed something like that, and I think the answer is much the same as it is for the Voter's Guide.
Many people watch the news. They hear the pundits talking, listen to the interviews, and it's apparently not a journalist's job to call bullshit on obvious bullshit. But watching the news is a fairly passive experience. It's easy to do, since you're doing it anyway. Otherwise, though, the most part of their priorities are taken up with work, maybe an investment portfolio or the mortgage or taxes, the kids if they have any—school, church, sports, music—and other relatively mundane practical necessities.
For contrast, I have quite a bit of time on my hands, comparatively. I can watch the pundits or read the editorial, and then track back to the original news stories, and even to the source documents if I can find them. That's how I end up laughing, as an example, at the conservative pundit railing about liberal bias on the Supreme Court, when all the Court did was uphold a decision by a conservative state court (e.g.,
Roper v. Simmons, 2005).
I would suggest that, despite the information availability, not many people have either the time or, should they have the time, the will to do that kind of rather basic research into an issue that interests them.
Additionally, I know some very well-educated people that have their opinions and actually refuse to engage the public discourse. They start from the premise that people are either stupid or crazy, politicians corrupt, and journalists useless, and go from there. In addition to being well-educated as far as a paper standard goes, they're actually pretty smart. But as to the
details of the issues? They deliberately avoid having a clue. And this can sometimes be embarrassing, like the time a friend of mine voted against the very kind of minority scholarships he received to go to college, but didn't realize until a while after the election what he'd done. It was, to the other, a memorable moment for me; I rarely see that friend fuck up so obviously—usually, it's just losing his keys, or dripping gasoline on his shoes when he's in a hurry.
Indeed, the American electorate is better educated and has greater information access than in prior times, but I don't know to what degree we can be assured that people are
using that education and information. Are they really "applying themselves to their full potential", to borrow a phrase?
This could be a case of peaks and valleys though ....
I wouldn't disagree. My father is a believer in the political pendulum. In fact, most people I know accept it to a certain degree. However, an underlying question is whether, if we were to graph the oscillation, it would describe an upward, downward, or stable mean.
I think our political system has been in decline
at least since the 1980s; one could easily argue since Nixon, and there is also a fair suggestion to be had about 1968. Others still would look at Kennedy's assassination, Ike and the military-industrial complex, Harry S., and we can have this argument all the way back to Garfield's corruption, Lincoln's refutation of the Confederate secession, or Jefferson's usurpation of the Constitution in the Louisiana Purchase. Things have definitely been tumbling, though, at least since the United States truly emerged as an international power after the First World War.
But, to return to the Reagan years, there seems to be a kind of transition that occurred then. Or began. It was something of a flip compared to the liberal hippie days. Suddenly, disrespect wasn't bad, but cunning politics. Scandal couldn't possibly have anything to do with law and principle, but only politics. When the heat turned up in '93 with Clinton's inauguration, political discourse began what seems a well-defined and sustained slide into the gutter we now have. This is accounted for in part by right-wing radio, but also by cable news and the internet, and for a leftist like me, capitalism as well. After all, with a shitload of new bandwidth to fill, capitalists wanted to fill it with
something for profit. Even my beloved NPR is part of this. I was listening to some woman covering the Haiti earthquake, and the question was, "What do you see? What is your experience?" And all I could think was,
I don't fucking care! After a while, it all starts sounding the same. The wreckage. The suffering. The mourning. The outrage. The stench. This, apparently, is what sells, not a dry and detailed discussion of why the French are pissed off at the Americans, what's wrong with their argument, and who all in Europe is distancing themselves from France in the matter. I heard a report Monday about Bill and George coming together for Barack, and the entirety of the thing was a thin lede, a description of what was said, and sound bites from each of the major players. That's it. Oh, and a ridiculous web address if you want to donate.
They're just filling up space, passing time, abusing bandwidth.
Thus, one of the problems with information ability is the quality of that information. Few people dig through statutes and statistics, read the bills or judicial decisions.
But more to the point about peaks and valleys, I would suggest instinctively or intuitively—I'm not sure what factors would need to be included to offer an accurate measurement—that the mean point between peak and trough is a lower figure than ten years ago, and that lower than ten years before, and so on. I'm not sure when this trend began, though.
Or maybe we are just ungovernable, like the Roman Empire, circa 180 AD ....
That's entirely possible, too. It seems odd, I know, to cite a video game, and repeatedly, but I'm still a fan of the statement from
Deus Ex that if you orient a society around the lowest qualities of its people, those qualities will be reflected in the leaders.
To take a recent minor event, the flap about Limbaugh praising a health system that was one of the models for the 1993 effort, which was decried as socialist. To the one, it's striking that conservatives don't seem to understand the irony others perceive. To the other, though, I don't think it matters. Some people just want to oppose; it's a cornerstone of their identity.
And, just to cover bases, before you or anyone else reminds me that we have those types on the left, too, I'll simply note that, while true, we've never, in my lifetime, had the public ear the way the Palin, Limbaugh, and Tea Party crowds do. We're Communists, Anarchists, and revolutionary Leftists. We were the enemy over a century ago, and people still don't give us much of a break. Our heyday came in the middle of a war, when people either envied or were disgusted by an eruption of hallucinogenic, free-love protest. I don't know if they enforce the law, but it's still on the books that registered Communists can't work for the federal government. There's nothing in there prohibiting a delusional Christian fanatic from taking a federal paycheck. Hell, we even put a motto on our money for those people.
I sincerely hope that we are seeing the death throes of a certain, extreme conservative ideology. Unfortunately, that would suggest they get one more run, and will fuck things up even worse than Bush and company. That may be the valley—or peak, if one is so inclined—or it may be symptomatic of a people who cannot, or will not, be governed. Or it may be symptomatic of an ignorance concomitant to overspecialization.
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Notes:
Weigle, Luther, et al. The Bible: Revised Standard Version. National Council of Churches USA. 1946. Quod.Lib.UMich.edu. January 20, 2010. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/r/rsv/
