America: Why R Your Peeps So Dum?

America: Why R Your Peeps So Dum?, written by Joe Bageant, says it all in depicting how incredibly ignorant the US public truly is and how it came to be.

"If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit."

But it gets better.

"As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it (does -ed) makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us -- those elites who run the institutions -- very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us."

Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution's members. "Hey, they're a lump. Whaddya expect us to do?"

To add fuel to the fire, click the BRT blurb  Idiot America to laugh and cry at the same time while reading Charles Pierce's ironic take on just how stupid people can be in this country.

"Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America?


Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise. And it looked like the national media simply could not help itself but be swept along. This started me thinking and, when I read a clip in the New York Times about the Creation Museum, I pitched an idea to Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire, that said simply, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” What we determined the theme of the eventual piece—and of the book—would be was “The Consequences Of Believing Nonsense.”

Idiot America sound better if you ask me. 

Last but not least, check out George Carlin's classic The Owners of This Country rant to see how our willful ignorance enables the powers at be to screw us over in ways that defy the imagination.