Nation Of Individualistic Sheep

Brought to our short attention span, interesting musing on the 'Bagger zeitgeist. We don't agree completely either, but it's a good look at the symptoms & some of the causes of a distrust of government in general & unwarranted self-confidence by Americans, neither of which are any damn help. We're only read it once, but there was little mention of foreign policy, & we don't remember any mention of Vietnam, not even here, where the exact time of lessening trust in gov't. is given.

Ever since the Seventies, social scientists have puzzled over the fact that, despite greater affluence and relative peace, Americans have far less trust in their government than they had up until the mid-Sixties.

Always the possibility of the TEA crowd killing their young, however. By inbreeding, perhaps.

People with higher degrees who care about food and wine, support gay rights, and want few children but good Internet connections have been gravitating to urban centers on the two coasts, while churchgoing families that drive everywhere, socialize with relatives, and send their kids to state universities have been heading to the growing exurbs of the southern and mountain states.

Can anything more repugnant be imagined?

Further Darwinism:

There are plenty of things wrong with the way medicine is practiced in the United States, but it does not follow from this that anybody can cure himself. Nonetheless, a growing number of us have become our own doctors and pharmacists, aided by Internet search engines that substitute for refereed medical journals, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control.

The trends are not encouraging. Because of irrational fear-mongering on the Web, the percentage of unvaccinated American children, while thankfully still low, has been rising steadily in the twenty-one states that now allow personal exemptions for unspecified “philosophical and personal reasons.” This is significant: the chance of unvaccinated children getting measles, to take just one example, is twenty-two to thirty-five times higher than that of immunized children.¹³Americans currently spend over four billion dollars a year on unregulated herbal medicines, despite total ignorance about their effectiveness, correct dosage, and side effects. And of course, many dangerous medicines banned in the United States can now be purchased online from abroad, not to mention questionable medical procedures for those who can afford the airfare.¹⁴

Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics. They question the authority of priests, then talk to the dead¹⁵; they second-guess their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect.

Well, we can't deny that the prospect of a quiverful household of un-vaccinated spawn having a simultaneous mini-epidemic cheers us.

We can't be bothered to pick more of it apart (Long & has FOOTNOTES!!) or even to seek the good parts confirming our prejudices, but this is probably the newest, most interesting point arrived at.

Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that “the people” can exercise it for their common benefit. American populist rhetoric does something altogether different today. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.

Just turn the gov't. over to the non-elite business interests. Please. We want it that way. Baaaa.