Dumbing Down The Message for the Masses

[Xipe Totec]

This is the Republican strategy: Make the message simple and the sheeple will remember it.

Sad but true.

Orwell mentions this strategy in Animal Farm, in the famous quote "4-legs good, 2-legs bad" which made it easy for the sheep to remember which side to support.

The real frightening thing, to me anyway, is how old this recipe for success really is. Older than Karl Rove, Orwell, Goebbels, and even older than Machiavelli. I found a quote that goes all the way back to the early middle ages and scares the hell out of me every time I read it:

"It is striking to see the most cultivated and the most eminent representatives of the new Christian elite, conscious of their cultural unworthiness compared to the last purists, renounce what they yet possessed or could acquire in the form of intellectual refinements so that they could make themselves accessible to their flocks. They chose to grow stupid in order to conquer. If this leaves us dissatisfied it is nonetheless impressive. This farewell to antique literature, often uttered by men fully aware of the circumstances, is by no means the least moving aspect of abnegation of the great Christian leaders of the early middle ages…. …Caesarius of Arles took this point of view further:

I humbly beg that the ears of the educated may be content to bear rustic expressions without complaint, so that all the Saviour’s flock can receive heavenly food in a simple and down-to-earth language. Since the ignorant and the simple cannot rise themselves to the height of the educated, let the educated deign to lower themselves to their ignorance. Educated men can understand what has been said to the simple, whereas the simple are not able to profit from what would have been said to the learned."

Jacques Le Goff
Medieval Civilization 400-1500
Barnes & Noble 2000