The American Voter: Dumb as Dogshit, Nearly as Inert

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/58905/the-american-voter-dumb-as-dogshit-nearly-as-inert

The American Voter: Dumb as Dogshit, Nearly as Inert
Elections
by Jaime O'Neill | October 10, 2014 - 10:13am

For those of us who are political junkies, the idea that more than a third of the U.S. population can’t name the three branches of government is astonishing. And depressing. And appalling. Every single day, we get ourselves all worked up about the latest way we’re getting fucked over by corrupt politicians, big money, and corporate con artists. We send money here and there. We organize protests occasionally, and a handful of the likeminded sometimes join us in our “consciousness-raising” efforts. We write letters to the editor, we argue with relatives who hold benighted views, we sputter and fume at our TV screens, we get our intestines in a knot over the latest bullshit from Limbaugh or Hannity, and we feel flashes of annoyance when we see the big stacks of books by Bill O’Reilly being sold at Costco. We fulminate to our spouses about the reprehensible Clarence Thomas and his moronic wife, and lose our appetite at the very mention of the name Antonin Scalia. Mike Huckabee reminds us of the vast history of hucksters who wrapped their self-interest in religion, and Dick Cheney evokes memories of legions of chicken hawks who spent their lives promoting wars so long as they didn’t have to fight them themselves.

We fuss and fight among ourselves, judging relative degrees of adherence to liberal orthodoxies, forming at least one circular firing squad every month or two as we jockey for the moral high ground with our fellow “progressives.” We read all we can from the organs of news and opinion required to maintain our standing as good lefties, from The Guardian to The Nation. We tune in dutifully to Democracy Now, MSNBC, and PBS, albeit it suspiciously. Noam Chomsky has yet to have an opinion we didn’t know about, and enough of us voted for Ralph Nader to cloud an election that would lead to a nightmarish and never-ending war. We are, sometimes, too damned smart for our own good, or the good of others.

The people who oppose us are equally engaged, or perhaps more so. They are more unified, less likely to stray off their own political reservation, and quite inclined to encase their views in the most strait-laced bumper sticker orthodoxy. They are, it must be said, less troubled by the moral issues that drive us nuts, and most of them are driven by a layer of racism they either don’t know or won’t admit.

We can fuss and fight, left and right, until the cows come home, but the reason the GOP elephant continues to dominate the room is because the real elephant in the room is the implacable ignorance and laziness of the American electorate.
Three decades ago, I wrote a piece for Newsweek about the ignorance of American college students. I’d given my students an 86-question quiz of people, places, and things I thought were “common knowledge.” Silly me. The answers students gave revealed a bone-deep ignorance of geography (Camp David was in Israel, Calcutta in New Mexico, Rio de Janiero in France), history (Darwin “invented gravity,” and Eisenhower was a 17th century American president), art (Picasso painted “the Last Supper”), literature (Andy Warhol wrote War and Peace), and politics (Karl Marx was a Russian comedian). J. Edgar Hoover invented the vacuum cleaner, and Heinreich Himmler devised the Heimlech maneuver.

[yeoman6987]

1. Well do we want to give a citizenship test before

Voting every election? Only those who receive a 75 percent can vote?


I am not sure that Americans would want that.

[rock]

2. The American politicians DO NOT WANT an educated voter

Why, if we had that, nearly all the incumbents would be voted out next election. Jeeze, wake up!