Or at least you would think so after reading this stellar piece of reporting by The Daily Beast. As usual, it picks up on the progressive meme that Americans have always been a bunch of stupid hayseeds who stumbled and bumbled their way to greatness despite themselves. Are Americans ill-informed? Sure. But notice the DB is careful not to include such things as the advocacy agenda driven curriculum in our schools and universities that focuses on indoctrinating our kids rather than teaching them actual facts about our government. Notice it doesn't point to a vacant and dismal quality of journalism that prefers to suppress inconvenient truths for fear of compromising the mission at hand. Notice it doesn't suggest that our culture is being dumbed-down by an entertainment industry's focus on sex, drugs, and bathroom humor at the expense of enlightened and profound contributions to the human experience.
Notice none of that is touched on. What is touched on is the progressive mantra that Americans are dumb, have always been dumb, and will continue to be dumb until we become more like...Europe. You know, Europe. Europe that is imploding, dying, and won't exist within a hundred years at the rate it is going. Europe that conquered 2/3 of the known world for itself, launched two world wars, had one of history's worst genocides, gave birth to history's most murderous ideology (Communism), and resolved to deal with its past by embracing a never before seen level of narcissism expressed through hedonism. That Europe is our goal.
No, America isn't smart. But it's not because we never were. Americans used to value something they called Common Sense. Sure, education was important. But so was commons sense. Good old fashioned horse sense. The kind of common sense that said 'maybe the fact that AIDS - a disease spread almost exclusively through sex, drugs, and promiscuity - is not so coincidental considering it exploded on the world stage within a decade of the generation that promoted sex, drugs, and promiscuity above all things.' That's the type of Smart Americans had. We've lost that, common sense not being favored by agenda makers because it is tough to gauge, and even tougher to manipulate. Those things we read about and lament - the gas chambers, the gulags, the ruined cities - those happened in a civilization that valued its own intellectual and cultural superiority above all things. America's problem is that we've gotten rid of the common sense, and replaced it with nothing more than shallow advocacy and punditry to advance ideals and agendas that one of those dumb moron types of old would have been hard-pressed to ever believe.
As for the Left's continued yearning to be like Europe. If the stories of social and economic implosions don't do it. If the fact that Europe has all but committed demographic suicide through catastrophically low birth rates doesn't do it. Then maybe this little clip, complements of the great James Garner, will help jar our memories a bit:
I love that scene. I find it hard to believe that Europeans could ever look at America with contempt, given the history of Europe. Good points about ignorance in our country and our past emphasis on common sense. Too bad we don't emphasize it today.
ReplyDelete