I have just about had it with these people who are showing up at the town hall meetings of Democrats and causing havoc, if not violence. I’m a big defender of first amendment free speech, but these people are clearly hollering “fire” in the proverbial crowded theater.
I don’t mean to be patronizing, but under any stretch of my imagination these people are idiots. This was clearly illustrated when a beleaguered host-congressman, asked people who were on Medicare to raise their hands and well over half of the mouth-breathers raised their hands!
This brings me to my purpose here: check out the new book by Charles Pierce, “Idiot America.” I have pasted in below the link to this book on the Amazon site.
This link also includes a nice interview with the author, which you can read even if you don’t buy his book. Here is a particular apropos excerpt from that interview, which winds its way back to the town hall chaos mentioned at the outset of this post:
Question: What is the difference between stupidity and glorifying ignorance?
Charles P. Pierce: Stupidity is as stupidity does, to quote a uniquely stupid movie. It has been with us always and always will be. But we moved into an era in which stupidity was celebrated if it managed to sell itself well, if it succeeded, if it made people money. That is “glorifying ignorance.” We moved into an era in which the reflexive instincts of the Gut were celebrated at the expense of reasoned, informed opinion. To this day, we have a political party—the Republicans—who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.
Amen.
