Gore is right!

Andrew Sullivan took umbrage with this comment from Gore Vidal, which I took as only half-crazy:

"[America is] rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military
dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything
together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the
American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how
dim-witted and ignorant his audience is," - Gore
Vidal.

The italicized portions are true, to my mind. Not just Obama, but Sullivan, too. When the vast majority of Americans don't even have library cards, and are proud of saying shit like "I hate to read," it's no wonder the populus is terrified of every thing that comes down the pike. I was just reading Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, about priests in Mexico in the 30's when, in certain Mexican states, priests were being hunted down and shot. It reminded me, for the umpteenth time, that there is always real trouble somewhere, and, for the most part, it's usually not here. We can be at war for eight years in Afghanistan, but tell the truth - have you noticed? Are the Pringles at your local Circle K any different or whatever? My point? Not sure I have one. Just that the morons out there bitching about everything under the sun (on all sides) have no sense of history whatsoever and little gratitude for how good things are.

Another day I will grouse about: twenty years ago, if someone had said that friggin' world-created-in-seven-24-days-not-even-as-a-metaphor-style creationism would be back, would you have believed it?



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