Mindless

It's not that John McCain and Sarah Palin invented campaigning based on "us versus them." They aren't the first in the Republican party to try to win by denigrating education and expertise, calling those who have them "elitists." It's just that they -- and the apparatus behind them -- have taken it to much higher levels than ever, and they've done it at the very time when we are threatening our own suicide. A time, in other words, when cooperation and calling upon the best advice from the best experts are needed more than ever before.

What the country needs, as in country first, is an electorate willing to think deeply about tough issues; and it needs leaders willing to and capable of calling on our best: our best thinkers, our best politicians, our best scientists, our best selves. Because it ain't gonna be easy, these next few years. It'll be harder, in fact, than either side has been willing to admit, and the reason no one is talking is that no one wants to listen.

With great gusto, from the top of the ticket all the way down, Republicans deride the idea of education, laugh at it in others, tout their own lack of it. Wear it like a damn pendant. From Neiman Marcus. Greedily they bait fear and division, smear their opponents, whatever it takes to win. At all costs. They count on sloppy thinking, because they know they've cultivated it (or, in the case of Sarah Palin, maybe it's because it's all she's ever known.)

It's the direction in which we've been heading for a long time, accelerating exponentially these last eight years: mindlessness. Cheered on by McPalin, facilitated by the religious right, we (they) are actively turning away from education, from science, from thought and discourse, from reality. Because those things are too damn hard. And, of course, because they threaten our (their) deepest need to believe that everything's fine. We make our own facts; that's how Bush did it, that's how Jerry and Pat do it. If the politicians on that side know better, they don't care; because it keeps getting them elected.

The paranoid in me sees it as a grand and cynical plan: recognizing the credulity of many of those on the hard religious right, the Republican party came upon the path to power by using them against themselves, playing to their weaknesses. In addition, knowing that liberal education is necessary to a functioning free society -- and that it's inimical to their ends -- they undertook the two-pronged approach of dumbing down public education and touting private (ie, fact-free, religious-based) education. It's working.

And, of course, there's the demonization of a free and inquisitive press. Inquiry, ipso facto, denotes bias. Divergence from the party line is the same as hatred of country.

It's perfect: to aggrandize power in an open society, you need both to close minds and prevent the spread of knowledge. In a big, brawny and previously energetically innovative country like ours, you'd think that'd be hard, or that it'd take time. Instead, to the amazement of those looking on from the outside, it's been easy as a snakebite.

About our leaders' recent rejection of science, Nobel Laureates are worried, and are urging a change in direction. Of course, these are the epitome of the elitists at whom the right like to sneer: professors, experts, researchers. Scientists, by golly. Thinkers. It not only makes no difference to those whose minds need changing: the very fact that Obama is endorsed by these eggheads is proof that he's the wrong guy. It's the ultimate damnation: don't need no smart people 'round here. We got our ideas all fixed in our head, end of discussion. La la la, we can't hear you.

That we are becoming -- already are -- a nation of idiots is clear. The rest of the world is leaving us in their dust, while on the right the response is either not to care, to rail against immigrants, or simply to deny the truth of it. What's not clear to me is how it came to this. The cause is clear: put simply, it's the rise of religiosity, bringing with it a rejection of reality. But why is it happening here? In other developed countries the trend is the opposite way: separation of religion from public policy or rejection of it entirely. Yet here we are, the once and past leaders of the world in scholarship, innovation, production, invention, electing people based on their religious views -- the more dogmatic the better -- willfully turning away from intellectual rigor. The "what" is obvious. It's the "why" that I don't get.

Tough times require tough thinking. Everywhere but in the US, it seems people understand that. Here, we've turned to magic. Or, rather, we've been led to it; and, for some reason, we've followed with only the occasional look back. Sarah Palin, many say with delight, is the new face of the Republican party. Indeed, I believe that's the case: a hyper-religious fanatical member of a sect-like subset of Christianity who confuses certainty with knowledge. A person for whom discrimination is a sacrament, and whose style of politics is distortion, fear-mongering, and division. One who denies the role of mankind in global warming, who believes God is controlling our politics, our wars, who ignores facts that get in her way. Who wants to ban books, believes "The Flintstones" was a documentary. USA! USA! USA!

This is what we are becoming, relentlessly. And it's why I see this election as such a bellwether of our future. It's why I hope -- deeply, with everything I have left -- for a resounding rejection of the tactics of McCain and the philosophy (if that's what it is) of Palin. For if we continue to laugh off the educated and thoughtful as silly elitists, and if we fall further into substituting her brand of magical and self-reinforcing faith for addressing worldly reality, our downward trajectory will only pick up speed.

I'm not a religious person, but I have valued friends who are. As one form of moral guidepost, as a way to ground oneself in this unsteady world, as a source of reliable strength to help on the journey, I respect it in my friends, because for them that's what it is. But as an alternate reality, as a substitute for grappling with the problems we all face on this planet, I reject it. The idea of my friends praying for the courage and strength they need, looking clear-eyed into the world, is, if anything, something I envy: I'm sure such faith is comforting. But the scenes of thousands of people in a megachurch, fed doomsday theology, speaking in tongues, being rid of witches -- that frightens me. Because those are people -- uncountable in numbers -- who've thrown in the towel and joined up; they've looked around and said, I can't handle it, I'm checking out. And to do it, I need the reinforcement of the likemindless, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, singing in unison with me. More than that, I need to decry and deny the reality of those who disagree, to cast them out, resoundingly to reject their very openness to uncertainty; because the least amount of disagreement threatens me. When facts run counter to my needed beliefs, I will ignore them. I will reject all cognitive dissonance, before it hurts. The Earth is a few thousand years old. Open-mindedness is next to godlessness. You can't tell me otherwise.

Whatever happened to the pioneer spirit, that can-do attitude?

I wouldn't care, except that it affects us all. The credulity demanded by these forms of faith (nor is charismatic Christianity the only threat) oozes outward. Those people, needy in their faith, are the same in their politics. They don't want to hear -- they simply can't deal with -- complexity. Nuance, gray zones? Not even. They must rail at those who don't agree with their simplistic view, and their chosen leaders are happy to feed the need. It is, heretofore and of late, a winning strategy.

Indeed, we appear to be in the end times after all. We are living during the culmination of a near-perfect plan (imperfect only in that, like endotoxin, it's killing its host), foisted by the devilish commingling of religionism and right-wing politics. Filling school boards with fanatics, home-schooling when possible, vouching for religious-based education when they can, in order to close minds to education; turning the populace against the idea of an inquisitive, free, and skeptical press; devaluing expertise and intellectual accomplishment as godless at worst, laughable at best; harnessing believers into the political fold, using their faith against their real-world interests; electing the narrowest of minds. It's a self-reinforcing power machine, and it's taking over. I guess if all that matters to our leaders is personal power, it's all good.

Maybe the religionists don't care: they're on their way to the rapture. But I wonder if at some point the Machiavellio-Rovian politicians who put it all together will have a moment of clarity. Just before we fail as a nation, as the lights go out on America as it once was, will they say "My God, what have we done?"