Dumbing Down Dumbocracy

Bob Herbert Op Edified this morning (08 Nov 2004) with the suggestion that it's the dismal ignorance of the American people that accounts for the last presidential election. As a retired professor of American Literature who has been living in Germany for the past five years (writing a book on the failed egalitarianism of the Bauhaus Movement) I agree. Let me give you the reasons why "the greatest nation in history" is performing so tackily.

Incidentally, if there is any American assumption that the European finds silly, even infantile, it's this City on the Hill obsession of being the greatest, to put it in the 1957 formulation of adman Fairfax Cone, "the All-Time Number One Hit on Humanity's Hit Parade". "Gratuitously gratingest" yes. Greatest? Ridiculous. Greatest number of murders. Greatest number of guns. Greatest porno industry. Greatest defection of eligible voters. Euros like to play the Greatest Game. It keeps them humble.

Let me begin with the greatest media. I no longer watch ABC, CBS, and NBC when I visit my home in Philadelphia. I've been spoiled by five years of Euro Media. I watch Deutsche Welle at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 35. And as my German improves, newscasts in that language, also on Channel 35.

I talk about TV because it is where I watched up close the playpenification of American Culture. As a cadet teacher in East Lansing in 1952 I was fired with enthusiasm for the new medium. I had my tenth grade watch Paddy Chayefsky's "The Catered Affair", about a Bronx taxi driver caught up in the conflicts of throwing a big wedding for his favorite daughter that he couldn't afford. The students were thrilled at the liveliness of this live TV performance. So was I, having grown up in a virtual lower middle class Michigan cultural ghetto. And my twelfth graders glowed as well watching Maurice Evans on the Hallmark Hall of Fame do "Macbeth".

I was so moved I wrote my first "national" article for Scholastic Teacher in 1954, "Everyman in Saddle Shoes" about my successes as a TV teacher. I even started a high school weekly TV program, "Everyman Is a Critic", following my mentor Gilbert Seldes in addressing the seven livelier arts. For Michigan State's fledgling UHF channel.It was a great place to learn a new medium.

This led to a Fund for the Republic year in New York where I devised "Teleguides" for the nation's high school teachers as the radio-TV editor of Scholastic Teacher. Which led to a Carnegie Postdoctoral fellowship at Penn to create a course on "The Mass Society" for their American Civilization department, which I then taught, as I helped organize the Annenberg School of Communication, where having nominated Seldes as the first dean, I became his gofer. And wrote the first curriculum.

Later I became the BBC acquisitions adviser for Time-Life Films, and NBC adviser for Films, Inc. I mention these details to show how much II wanted TV to succeed, especially commercial TV, for whom I eventually did weekend filmed cultural reports (shot, edited, and audio) for the evening news(on the weekends when it wouldn't depress the ratings too much!).

But what a mess it became. In this last election, vile. One moderate Democrat was accused of supporting the Taliban who were described as kidnappers and rapists of young girls. Remember it was Saint Ronald of Santa Barbara who destroyed the Fairness Doctrine by arrogant edict, in his noisome plan to undo the New Deal.

It was Karl Rove who gave a week-long canonization for a burial as an election ploy. Whatever works in the world of Big Bucks, Bush is willing to stoop to. This corrupt commercialization has destroyed every sector of American life. America's motto might as well be: MONEY TALKS. BIG MONEY TRUMPS ALL CRITICISM.

It's no lie. We were all Two Americas. The Ancien Regime where the powerful get away with everything and the poor pay twice through the nose. Note Bush's bio. Multiple drunk driving charges unpunished. AWOL from Air National Guard, for early entry into Harvard Biz Ad mill. One of his professors there remarks that this compassionate Christian conservative found "Grapes of Wrath" corny. As a business man, he was a serial bankrupt, in his last failure punishing his stockholders by dumping his shares in egregious insider training which the SEC punished him by a tap on his little finger.

Note that the grubby little stake he had in the Texas Rangers was stolen from his clients. And little wonder he believes in miracles because that grubby little share swelled to a humungous share, the sale of which made him a Crawford TX millionaire rancher, where he likes to clear the brush. Nice non-work if you can get, and you can if you are part of the Skull and Bones Ancien Regime. Remember, America was started as an antonym to the Ancien Regime. And the gratingest governor Texas ever had established a new record in prisoner execution. Two systems of justice. Just Us justice.

And there are two systems of education, based on property taxes. The affluent worry about getting into an Ivy. The effluent worry about their children not getting shot to,in, or returning from school. NIMBY prevails. Give the blessed the most help. Give the deprived more depravity. The biggest laugh in the First Bush term is his "Leave no Child Behind" farce. Declare it, but don't fund it.And set a perverse example in your own intellectual life. Don't be caught reading anything. And smirk, when you return to your Alma Mater, that gentlemanly C's don't do too bad, to speak phony demotic as he so often does. "Leave no First Moron behind" would be my motto, given the chance.

I finally psyched out the "greatest nation" gambit. Americans are so (logically) guilt ridden by how far their historical and contemporary performances fall short of their Fourth of July rhetoric that they whistle a merry tune as they stumble in their own dumbocratic darkness. Dumbocracy is a formula for self-deception. In the Bible Bubble, they're beginning to dump Darwin. Texas purges its biology textbooks of any allusion that might be construed as be fair to Dick Cheney's daughter. And Rove, the dimestore Machiavelli, prowls the crowds looking for another lie he can hornswoggle the dumbocrats (of both parties) with.

I used to talk with David Riesman about the failure of the American elite to lead. He relished talking with a guy who had worked his way to a Ph.D.in the automobile factories or Detroit and Cleveland. Especially at Penn, I noticed how the fledgling elites learned to fly high. No doubt about it. They were bright. And they were ambitious. Nothing wrong with that. But it was absolutely dedicated to individual success.

Communal responsibilities simply never figured. Even during the Free Speech era. The best student I ever had at Penn, Harvard Law of course, ended up wealthy in a law firm, oddly, that bears the name of one Ivy who was communal, Richardson Dilworth. He writes glib speeches for Arlen Spector, that archetypal doubletalker, and wistfully wonders whether his beautiful blonde TV reporter is a credit to his family.

Only a country with such moral sloppiness could tolerate executives "earning" 500 times their workers, who too often work for less than a living wage, without health insurance, and about to lose "overtime". How can any sane person call this great. It's shabby. It's disgusting. It's a crime against humanity.

Imagine how healthier the world would now be had our leaders throughout the twentieth century not played footsie with dictators and sheiks. Imagine a CIA that didn't engage in Ivy League promotion rituals, but had learned enough Arabic to understand the Osama phenomenon before it was too late. And imagine how much more creative the twentieth first century could have been if the First Smirker had not been playing Schoolyard Bully diplomacy. Dear old Molly Ivins, opening the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at Zellerbach Hall, recalled such antics as Freedom Fries in the First World War. Brave souls started kicking dachshunds. She noticed they never seemed to take on German Shepherds!

So the old Greeks were right. Hubris precedes disaster. Bushleaguer George W. has hubris from top to toe, not bothering to read when Jesus talks right straight to him, as he takes Dumbocracy to the Middle Eastern heathens as he never did to his fellow Texans. We dumbed ourselves down. And now we're all going to pay for it.