During the past four decades, America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic. This new form of anti-rationalism, at odds not only with the nation’s heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge, has propelled a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater damage than its historical predecessors inflicted on American culture and politics.
The “greatest generation” was bound together by mutual needs and common threats. It invested in strong public institutions as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism, and communism. Yet increasingly over the past three decades, “we’re all in it together” has been replaced by “you’re on your own.”
Depression came over the reporter. Try as he would, he could not make himself happy with McCarthy supporters. Their common denominator seemed to be found in some blank area of the soul, a species of disinfected idealism which gave one the impression when among them of living in a lobotomized ward of Upper Utopia.
“Thus, the press’ curiosity was not aroused when a 7.65-caliber German Mauser mutated into a 6.5-caliber Italian Mannlicher-Carcano; or when the grassy knoll receded into oblivion; or when an entrance wound in the President’s throat became an exit wound (first for a fragment from the head wound and then for a bullet from the back wound); or when a wound six inches below the President’s shoulder became a wound at the back of the neck. The press was thereby weaving a web that would inevitably commit it to the official findings.”
A little more than a week after Dallas, Timothy Leary received a disturbing phone call from Mary Meyer. “Ever since the Kennedy assassination I had been expecting a call from Mary,” wrote Leary in Flashbacks. “It came around December 1. I could hardly understand her. She was either drunk or drugged or overwhelmed with grief. Or all three.” “They couldn’t control him any more,” said Mary between her sobbing and crying. “He was changing too fast. They’ve covered everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m afraid. Be careful.”Leary later recalled this exchange in 1990. He told Leo Damore, “She was very upset, distraught. Her call spooked me. And I never imagined she’d be killed less than a year later.”
We Americans, let alone our English forefathers, have produced very, very few anti-imperialists. Our idiom has been empire, and so the primary division was and remains between the soft and the hard.
Charles Deemer teaches screenwriting at Portland State University. He is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and pioneer in hyperdrama. He was the editor of Oregon Literary Review and the artistic director of Small Screen Video.
"Having written almost daily for over 40 years, I can say that writing is not a job or a vocation or a profession--it is an existence. It is a way of being in the world."
"Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street." Mary Ellen Lease, 1890
"All humanity's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room," - Blaise Pascal.
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