When ignorance becomes a movement: The rise of Snookiism - By David Rothkopf
When ignorance becomes a movement: The rise of Snookiism - By David Rothkopf
It now falls to the mainstream Republican leadership, especially to presumptive Speaker John Boehner, to control this group and limit its worst traits. And all spirited Americans who can read and write ought to be pulling for him. Because if he fails, America will face the threat of the spread of a strain of reckless demagoguery unprecedented in our history, a Snookidemic that threatens to effectively lobotomize the body politic.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Mainstream, rock-ribbed, you-can’t-make-me-flinch Republicans are. One former leader of the party I spoke with the other night said, “We’ve never seen anything like them. The Gingrich ‘Contract with America’ revolution was mild by comparison.” Representative Bob Inglis, attacking the play to the lowest-common I.Q. of the base, said, “We’re getting what we deserve.”
The Dunce
America’s first know-nothings were a mid-19th century collection of nativists who dreaded “foreign” influences on the American way of life. Reactionary as they were, we may someday see them as a collection of Rhodes Scholars and Nobel Prize Winners compared to their lineal political descendents who make up the current crew of Republican extremists now flexing their recently pumped up muscles in the Congress. Knowing nothing would be an improvement for this group which defiantly embraces the wrong, the indefensible, the illogical and the absurd with their only apparent criteria for taking a position being that it feels good for their adrenaline-stoked base. Facts, science, knowledge, and reality are all seen as the tools of elites, weapons against common folks who have gotten along just fine believing in foolish ideas for all these years.
The roots for the current movement could be found in the arguments of creationists against teaching the science of evolution in the schools. But today we have a new generation of fundamentalists … climate creationists, foreign policy creationists, deficit creationists … for whom arithmetic and history are simply the tools of the devil. They invoke the founders but sound more like their contemporaries in England who argued that the reason that British hikers were finding fish fossils in the mountains of England had nothing to do with where seas once might have been millions of years before and instead was a consequence of God putting the fossils there to trick people into doubting the literal word of the Bible.
