It's definitely tough to live in an idiot nation, or "Idiocracy" as a comedic film (that also had some serious undertones) framed it not many years ago. Though we long to see a departure from idiot norms, it appears some new evidence continually resurfaces to remind us that we aren't there yet. One can start with the old saws that 80% of Americans literally believe in an 'old man in the sky' version of God, 87% believe in miracles and 57% still believe in the fables of Heaven and Hell.
Then one gets to the science arena, and the toll gets even more depressing. Two thirds of Americans, including 25% of those college educated, don't accept Evolution. Nearly one fourth don't accept the Earth revolves around the Sun, and almost half don't accept the Big Bang - while nearly 60% express doubts about the theory of man-made global warming.
A more recent Gallup poll, disclosed (and I kid you not) that 37% of Americans believe houses can be haunted! Coming out at nearly the same time, a Pew Survey poll showing that one in five Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim! To quote the reaction of Washington Post blogger and columnist, Joel Achenbach:
"Are Americans total numbskulls?"
Well, maybe. But then again, perhaps we can be generous and simply say it's a case of information overload. There is just too much information flooding the air waves, not to mention the net waves, and most people are ill-equipped to handle it. It's far easier just to turn to Faux News and get the skinny from one or more blowhards there, whether Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly or some other clown masquerading as a serious journalist.
The odd thing here is that the percentage convinced Obama is Muslim appears to have nearly doubled from ~ 11% around a year ago, to nearly 19%. How can this be possible? (The Economist magazine in a new poll taken after the 9-11 Mosque controversy- also shows that 80% of Republicans buy into this, and 48% of Democrats - which is itself astounding).
How can this be possible? Denver Post columnist Mike Littwin ('Our Odious I.Q.(Islam Quagmire')) has one theory:
"It has to be about Obama and The Other. It has to be that seeing Obama as a Muslim- as several writers have pointed out - is another way of seeing him as un-American. McCarthy had communists under his bed, and some Americans think Obama has a prayer rug stored in the Lincoln bedroom)"
But is this really new? Not so! Those with long memories and some knowledge of American history can easily point to dozens of examples wherein screwballs attempted to demonize those they didn't like - usually the Rightwing calumniating the Left and its primary political heroes.
Arthur Schlesinger, in his book A Thousand Days (1969) observed:
“…in the domain of the radical right it all became much sicker and nastier. Not since the high point of the hate-Roosevelt enthusiasm of the mid-thirties had any President been the target of such systematic and foul vilification. Everything about Kennedy fed resentment: his appearance, his religion, his wealth, his intelligence, his university, his section of the country, his wife, his brothers, is advisers, his support of the Negroes, his refusal to drop the bomb.”
Meanwhile, in the mid 1990s, then President Bill Clinton's wingnut enemies made a film accusing him of murder in the Vince Foster (suicide) case. It wasn't enough they hounded him over a silly Arkansas land deal (Whitewater) they couldn't nail him on (they had to have someone named Linda Tripp violate Maryland's wiretap phone laws to get some dope on a 'blow job' from one Monica Lewinsky) they had to try and pin murder on him too.
Meanwhile, FDR in the 1930s had to face a savage backlash to his social insurance reforms, with people slandering him as a "communist" and "socialist".
JFK himself, during the 1960 campaign, had to actually confront a group of hardcore (Baptist, Pentecostal etc.) evangelicals who were attempting to undermine his campaign by sowing rumors that if he was elected, his first act would be to sign the nation over to the papacy! In no uncertain terms, JFK faced down his assailants at a large meeting, accepted their biased questions then disabused them of their off the wall notions, emphasizing to them that he intended to follow the principle of separation of Church and State to the letter. After his solid lecture, they all shut up and left the assembly with tails suitably between their legs.
So make no mistake the "Obama = Muslim" meme is not new, it is just amazing how widespread it is with essentially no evidence to support it. Well, okay, there is the usual circumstantial evidence, such as: Obama is the son of a Kenyan Muslim father and atheist mother, and was born in Hawaii. But my question is: Why don't more people accuse him of being an atheist? Or is this some father thing going on here? Whatever the father's religion was, he must also have. Which is nuts! By that token, I'd be classed as a Southern Baptist - my dad's original religion- as opposed to being an atheist!
The association may also have arisen because Obama spent much of his youth in Muslim Indonesia, but again so what? How intelligent is it to infer a religious affiliation based on where one spent some time geographically?
In the end, we should accept an individual's word of what he is, since he is the one who knows best! We can also see that Obama attends church regularly, well....at least more often than Ronnie Reagan did, so from that point of view displays more direct evidence of being Christian than Muslim. So far as I know, no one's photographed him in a mosque yet. Far less, kneeling on a prayer rug inside a mosque and bowing toward Mecca!
In the end, of course, it won't matter what Obama says or does, people of undisciplined mentality, prejudice and intellectual inadequacy will still see him as they choose to see him. JFK understood this well, which is why he made no outward efforts to stem the widely circulated nonsense (in late 1963) that he was a "Communist fellow traveler", since he signed a Nuclear Test Ban treaty with Nikita Khrushchev, and two months later federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect black students in an integration effort.
Even in Texas, for his ill-fated political mission to shore up the Democratic party there- after seeing a 'Wanted for Treason' poster displayed in a Dallas paper, he simply shrugged his shoulders and exclaimed: "Well, what can you do? We're in Nut country now!"
Maybe Obama should take the same philosophical approach, as opposed to getting snared in a trap in which he has to proclaim his Christian identity every time a wingnut looney on the nightly news makes bald and erroneous remarks on his religion.
Then one gets to the science arena, and the toll gets even more depressing. Two thirds of Americans, including 25% of those college educated, don't accept Evolution. Nearly one fourth don't accept the Earth revolves around the Sun, and almost half don't accept the Big Bang - while nearly 60% express doubts about the theory of man-made global warming.
A more recent Gallup poll, disclosed (and I kid you not) that 37% of Americans believe houses can be haunted! Coming out at nearly the same time, a Pew Survey poll showing that one in five Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim! To quote the reaction of Washington Post blogger and columnist, Joel Achenbach:
"Are Americans total numbskulls?"
Well, maybe. But then again, perhaps we can be generous and simply say it's a case of information overload. There is just too much information flooding the air waves, not to mention the net waves, and most people are ill-equipped to handle it. It's far easier just to turn to Faux News and get the skinny from one or more blowhards there, whether Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly or some other clown masquerading as a serious journalist.
The odd thing here is that the percentage convinced Obama is Muslim appears to have nearly doubled from ~ 11% around a year ago, to nearly 19%. How can this be possible? (The Economist magazine in a new poll taken after the 9-11 Mosque controversy- also shows that 80% of Republicans buy into this, and 48% of Democrats - which is itself astounding).
How can this be possible? Denver Post columnist Mike Littwin ('Our Odious I.Q.(Islam Quagmire')) has one theory:
"It has to be about Obama and The Other. It has to be that seeing Obama as a Muslim- as several writers have pointed out - is another way of seeing him as un-American. McCarthy had communists under his bed, and some Americans think Obama has a prayer rug stored in the Lincoln bedroom)"
But is this really new? Not so! Those with long memories and some knowledge of American history can easily point to dozens of examples wherein screwballs attempted to demonize those they didn't like - usually the Rightwing calumniating the Left and its primary political heroes.
Arthur Schlesinger, in his book A Thousand Days (1969) observed:
“…in the domain of the radical right it all became much sicker and nastier. Not since the high point of the hate-Roosevelt enthusiasm of the mid-thirties had any President been the target of such systematic and foul vilification. Everything about Kennedy fed resentment: his appearance, his religion, his wealth, his intelligence, his university, his section of the country, his wife, his brothers, is advisers, his support of the Negroes, his refusal to drop the bomb.”
Meanwhile, in the mid 1990s, then President Bill Clinton's wingnut enemies made a film accusing him of murder in the Vince Foster (suicide) case. It wasn't enough they hounded him over a silly Arkansas land deal (Whitewater) they couldn't nail him on (they had to have someone named Linda Tripp violate Maryland's wiretap phone laws to get some dope on a 'blow job' from one Monica Lewinsky) they had to try and pin murder on him too.
Meanwhile, FDR in the 1930s had to face a savage backlash to his social insurance reforms, with people slandering him as a "communist" and "socialist".
JFK himself, during the 1960 campaign, had to actually confront a group of hardcore (Baptist, Pentecostal etc.) evangelicals who were attempting to undermine his campaign by sowing rumors that if he was elected, his first act would be to sign the nation over to the papacy! In no uncertain terms, JFK faced down his assailants at a large meeting, accepted their biased questions then disabused them of their off the wall notions, emphasizing to them that he intended to follow the principle of separation of Church and State to the letter. After his solid lecture, they all shut up and left the assembly with tails suitably between their legs.
So make no mistake the "Obama = Muslim" meme is not new, it is just amazing how widespread it is with essentially no evidence to support it. Well, okay, there is the usual circumstantial evidence, such as: Obama is the son of a Kenyan Muslim father and atheist mother, and was born in Hawaii. But my question is: Why don't more people accuse him of being an atheist? Or is this some father thing going on here? Whatever the father's religion was, he must also have. Which is nuts! By that token, I'd be classed as a Southern Baptist - my dad's original religion- as opposed to being an atheist!
The association may also have arisen because Obama spent much of his youth in Muslim Indonesia, but again so what? How intelligent is it to infer a religious affiliation based on where one spent some time geographically?
In the end, we should accept an individual's word of what he is, since he is the one who knows best! We can also see that Obama attends church regularly, well....at least more often than Ronnie Reagan did, so from that point of view displays more direct evidence of being Christian than Muslim. So far as I know, no one's photographed him in a mosque yet. Far less, kneeling on a prayer rug inside a mosque and bowing toward Mecca!
In the end, of course, it won't matter what Obama says or does, people of undisciplined mentality, prejudice and intellectual inadequacy will still see him as they choose to see him. JFK understood this well, which is why he made no outward efforts to stem the widely circulated nonsense (in late 1963) that he was a "Communist fellow traveler", since he signed a Nuclear Test Ban treaty with Nikita Khrushchev, and two months later federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect black students in an integration effort.
Even in Texas, for his ill-fated political mission to shore up the Democratic party there- after seeing a 'Wanted for Treason' poster displayed in a Dallas paper, he simply shrugged his shoulders and exclaimed: "Well, what can you do? We're in Nut country now!"
Maybe Obama should take the same philosophical approach, as opposed to getting snared in a trap in which he has to proclaim his Christian identity every time a wingnut looney on the nightly news makes bald and erroneous remarks on his religion.
1 comment:
The political climate in the country right now is disturbing, as is the ignorance of some sectors of the public. I too was alarmed by the recent Pew survey stating that 18% of Americans think Obama is a Muslim.
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