America: Land of Fools

Just after George Bush had been elected for the second time a British periodical headlined the question: “How Can 62- Million People Be So Dumb?” How indeed. Almost 62 million people in this country voted for Bush after it had been made more than clear that he had started a terribly destructive, incredibly expensive and totally unjustified war in Iraq and after it had become more than obvious to anyone with the power to observe that he was engaged in a quite effective program of redistributing the wealth of the nation to about 1% of the population at the expense of the rest of us. What kind of population, in other words, doesn’t have a clue to its own good; and what factors are responsible for creating such an unfortunate “bio-mass,” as someone has termed them?

Did decades of being manipulated by the corporate merchants and their political puppets do it? Did the defective American public education system do it? Was it that their fears, insecurities and pseudo-patriotism were effectively pandered to by the political strategists? Was it a combination of these and a variety of other factors? I’m not sure what the explanation is; but it seems clear that we don’t have a population that could be classified as overly bright. Recent international polls reveal that people all over the world think that Americans have taken leave of their senses. Do they have much in the way of senses to leave in the first place? They actually elected George Bush twice! No, I’m not making it up. It really happened!

I have lived in this country for over six decades. America was the pride of the world when I was growing up. How did it become “The Land of Fools?” Should I just forget about it and move to New Zealand or somewhere? Is it all over? I don’t know; but if I hear anyone refer to the “wisdom of the American people” again, I’m going to become a very unpleasant old man to deal with.