Susan Jacoby's study is highly recommended. Final excerpts (others in previous posts):
What is striking about this speech [Robt Kennedy announcing King's assassination], apart from its unscripted nature, is its elevated tone and language. Kennedy assumed that an audience of ordinary men and women --ladies and gentlemen -- would respond to words written thousands of years ago by a Greek dramatist. [Aeschylus] ... I cannot imagine a popular politician making such a speech in the current cultural climate, even if his own literary tastes led him to turn naturally to Greek tragedy, because he would fear being branded a snob and an elitist.
... the inescapable theme of our time is the erosion of memory and knowledge. Memory loss has made us bad stewards of our intellectual inheritance, and the dissipation of our cultural storehouse gives rise in turn to new cycles of forgetting. Anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism flourish in a mix that includes addiction to infotainment, every form of superstition and credulity, and an educational system that does a poor job of teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.
But it would take awesome courage for a candidate to say to voters: "The problem isn't just that you were lied to. The real problem is that we, as a people, have become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions. The problem is that two thirds of us can't find Iraq on a map, and many members of Congress don't know a Shiite from a Sunni. The problem is that the public doesn't know enough or care enough about culture to be outraged when a United States secretary of defense, informed that some of the oldest artifacts of Western civilization are being looted from a Baghdad museum on our watch, says dismissively, 'Stuff happens.' The problem is that most of us don't bother to read newspapers or even watch the news on television. Our own ignorance is our worst enemy."
Our own ignorance is our worst enemy. Amen.
And I can think of no election in my lifetime in which ignorance and downright lying are peddled so aggressively with such a transparent sugar-coating.
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