How Stupidity Became a Virtue
Cliff
"How the right wing manufactures perceived truths"
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For example, Pierce starts off the book with a story about a trip to a Tennessee
amusement park called Creation Museum where statue dinosaurs wear saddles and
wait patiently in line as Noah herds them into the Ark. Park-goers fork out
almost $150 per-head to hear sermons about how �dinosaurs co-existed with humans
(hence the saddles)��
Ken Ham, the parks� mastermind and founder of an organization called Answers in
Genesis, tells participants, �We are taking the dinosaurs back from the
evolutionists!�
According to Pierce, right-wing nuts (Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, et al) gain
their credibility by adhering to �The Three Great Premises.�
�The First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it sells enough books, soaks up
ratings, or otherwise moves units,� writes Pierce. �The crank then becomes
simply someone with another product to sell within the unimaginative parameters
of the marketplace; his views are just another impulse buy, like the potato
chips near the cash register.�
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�The Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly
enough.� Again, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage come to mind. How many times have
they hammered away, yelling and interrupting condescendingly as guests sincerely
try to make points and honestly provide answers to complex questions? This is
their method. They thrive off of anger and cynicism. And rile people up without
providing answers to anything.
�Idiocy can come to the nation wholly and at once and, because idiocy is almost
always good television,� writes Pierce, �it can remain a viable product long
after the available evidence and common sense has revealed it to be what it is.�
Idiocy!
Even worse, �Get your ideas on television � or, even better, onto its precocious
great-grand child, the Internet, where television�s automatic validation of an
idea can be instant and vast � and it will circulate forever, invulnerable and
undying. The ideas will exist in the air,� writes Peirce. �They will be �out
there,� and therefore they will be real, no matter what reality itself may be.�
�The Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe,� writes
Pierce. �Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.�
�Under The Third Great Premise, respect for the effort required to develop and
promulgate nonsense somehow bleeds into a respect that validates the nonsense
itself,� writes Pierce.
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�Iran-Contra should have immunized the American public forever against wishful
fact-free adventurism...,� writes Pierce.
Ultimately though, nonsense promulgated by pundits, politicians and presidents
alike (President Bush anyone? Weapons of mass destruction? Iraq?) continues to
impact the body-politic.
How many times have we heard the tea-baggers, militias and racists � all funded
by right-wing health care industry lobbyists � yell at the top of their lungs:
President Obama wants to kill my grandma. A health care public option will
create rationing. Etc. It doesn�t matter that it isn�t true. Glenn Beck believes
it. A lot of people watch Glenn Beck. He moves units, therefore he must know
what he�s talking about. Additionally, he�s loud and yells a lot. And he works
hard spreading nonsense. He believes fervently in his nonsense, therefore,
according to The Great Premises, it must be true.
Is this what right-wing political discourse has come down to? It�s an insult to
the American people!
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