If You Can Read This, You May Not Be A Complete Fascist

Those of you here for the articles (rather than the majority of visitors, who are here for the black & white shot of Sophia Loren bare-breasted 50 yrs. ago, the "Christian Domestic Discipline" item or the "Rocky" Welch photos) may be literate enough to be interested in a treatise from the current New Yorker by Caleb Crain on the decline of literacy right here in River City, where we literate, often coastal urbanites find ourselves in constant conflict w/ the functionally illiterate farmers, ranchers, sheepherders, shitshovelers, assembly line workers & sales reps who inhabit Jesusland.

According to the Department of Education [...] the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”— declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.

That's right, only thirteen per cent of the population of our so-called democracy can compare editorials, most of which are probably deliberately written at a freshman level. High school freshman level. There's also some interesting scientific material which, to our jaundiced mind, indicates why the inhabitants of Jesusland are the way they are. ("The peasants are revolting." "They certainly are.") We literary smart guys have all heard of the "authoritarian mind-set," as popularized by John Dean in his book (Conservatives Without Conscience) about what a bunch of assholes today's Republican party is. This may be a significant part of why those people are so eager & able to accept "wisdom:"

In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

Take that, true-believing wingnut nitwits! Those of you thinking that the Internet offers hope that the powers of literacy may yet triumph over the numb masses of accepting sheep should surrender now. The new Morlocks will be those w/ broadband, watching YouTube™ & feeding on the rational, defenseless Eloi who can't afford anything but text-&-still-photos-only dial-up.