Conclusion

Fat Butts and Soft Brains

The surgeon general recently reported that two out of three Americans are overweight. The obesity problem has gotten so bad that, earlier this year, Disneyland had to close the It’s a Small World attraction to deepen the waterways. The fiberglass flumes, built in 1963, were too shallow to accommodate today’s heavier Americans. They kept hitting bottom, stranding riders and causing long delays for those waiting in line.

Our growing blubber leads to myriad problems, from diabetes to heart disease. But another sort of epidemic has even wider reaching consequences than our heaving bellies and bosoms, and no one is sounding the alarm. It’s the dangerous fatness above our shoulders, in our soft, mushy brains.

This book has been full of tough truths. I haven’t pulled any punches yet and I’m not going to start now. So here’s the toughest truth of all: it’s not just the corrupt politicians and the greedy corporations that got us into this mess. If you want someone to blame, take a look in the mirror. The ignorance in this country is staggering. We overeat. We overspend. We over-everything. And, worst of all, we anesthetize ourselves with celebrity gossip while politicians loot our national treasure and wage wars in our name.

Of course, this is just the way big government and big business want us-placid, obedient consumers who won’t challenge authority. It’s time to wake up and pay attention, America, even if it hurts to see what’s in front of us.

Why Do So Few Americans Want to Hear or Know the Truth?

We can complain all we want about the corporate media and its constant dumbing down of the news. But the fact of the matter is that ratings for salacious, tabloid-style coverage keep going up. Fox News, with its blaring guitar lead-ins and red-white-and-blue graphics, consistently tops all other networks. Ann Coulter, a shameless warmonger, sells millions of books. And the pill-popping Rush Limbaugh dominates our radio waves. “The Dumb,” as author James Campion called our national fat-headedness, is alive and well.

Yes, multinational conglomerates have hijacked our press. Yes, during the lead up to the Iraq War, they regurgitated PR spin from government-funded propagandists. And yes, their war-drum pounding overpowered the publicly available evidence that contradicted all the “mushroom cloud” talk. But it takes two to tango, as they say. Big Media may have led the dance to war, but gullible Americans followed along.

A 2004 Harris Poll showed that 62 percent of us believed “Saddam Hussein had strong ties with Al Qaeda.” Four in ten said Saddam actually helped plan the 9/11 attacks. Nearly two years later, another Harris Poll reported that 64 percent now believed Saddam Hussein was in league with the terrorists.

How could so many of our fellow citizens be so wildly wrong, and for so long? It’s true that Vice President Cheney and others in the Bush Administration repeatedly cited questionable intelligence that linked Saddam to Al Qaeda. But the 9/11 Commission report, released in July of 2004 and widely covered in the media, clearly stated that Iraq had nothing to do with September 11. And President Bush himself repeatedly conceded that we had “no evidence” that Saddam participated in the attacks. Obviously, people are not paying close attention.

The shameless manipulation of facts by Dick Cheney and his neo-con gang reminds me of chilling quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, often mistakenly attributed to Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels: “The broad masses of the nation … in the primitive simplicity of their minds more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie.”

Along similar lines, Goebbels himself once said, “Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets of hatred.” Can you think of a larger displacement of aggression than attacking the wrong country?

Displaced, Misplaced, Arrogant, and Dumb

Remember the 2000 election campaign, when then-Governor George W. Bush couldn’t name the leaders of Chechnya, Pakistan, or India? Well, apparently that did not bother half the American population, who still voted for him. And four years later, after Bush’s ignorance of world affairs had already dragged our nation into a disastrous war, we gave his stupidity a big thumbs up by re-electing him.

We must ask ourselves, why in the world would Americans abide, let alone support, such an incurious, uninformed president? Could it be that too many of us are equally incurious and uninformed?

People used to chatter about Mr. Bush’s appealing everyman qualities, how he just “seemed like a regular guy.” Scads of news stories told us that countless Americans imagined they’d feel comfortable sitting down and having a beer with him. Maybe these Americans felt such immediate fondness because they, too, couldn’t name the leaders of foreign countries. After all, statistics show that many of these folks couldn’t even find other lands on a map.

Not long ago, a National Geographic survey revealed that only 17 percent of young adults in America could locate Afghanistan.  Think that’s bad? A recent Miss Teenage America failed to locate the United States on a world map! OK, beauty queens aren’t famous for their prodigious brainpower, but another survey shows that 45 percent of our youth are every bit as geographically challenged as she is, which is almost too awful to believe, but unfortunately, I do.

“The Dumb” Does Not Discriminate

Even educated people suffer from our national fat-headedness. In his book The Assault on Reason, Al Gore makes a distinction between the “well-educated” and the “well-informed.” He uses members of Nazi Germany’s intellectual classes as examples of perfectly smart people who remained willfully ignorant. A similar dynamic took place among the Soviet intelligentsia. Now it seems to be a major problem here in America as well. Gore points to a recent poll showing that 57 percent of college students could not name a single Supreme Court justice. That’s scary.

I recently got a first-hand look at some of America’s well-educated but uninformed people. I was having a discussion with my neighbors down in Palm Springs. The subject of President Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech came up. They stubbornly defended both Bush and the speech, using an argument I’d never heard before.

The “Mission Accomplished” banner stretched out behind Bush that day, they said, did not refer to the wider war in Iraq. And Bush himself, in his speech, was not trying to say that the war was over. He was simply congratulating the crew of the Abraham Lincoln at the end of their ten-month deployment. In other words, their mission was accomplished, not the mission of the rest of the armed forces.

I was dumbfounded. Later that night, I got hold of the full text of the speech. I didn’t find one word about the Abraham Lincoln or its recent mission. The whole thing was about how wonderfully our armed forces, all of our armed forces, had performed, how decisively they’d smashed Saddam’s armies. Did my neighbors just dream up their own version of the “Mission Accomplished” debacle? I did some more research and, as it turns out, none other than First Lady Laura Bush confected their ridiculous excuse for the speech. Speaking shortly after the three-year anniversary of the event, she told John King of CNN, “The fact is, when the president stood on the Abraham Lincoln, that Abraham Lincoln’s mission was accomplished.”

Now, I ask you, how do reasonable, thinking Americans respond to such a lame, patently ridiculous claim? How do we deal with political figures who shamelessly lie like this?  If my neighbors allow themselves to be taken in by such revisionist, easily debunked malarkey, can I ever expect to reason with them? These are not children. These are not illiterate peasants or high school dropouts. These are highly educated, wealthy people!

“The Dumb,” apparently, does not discriminate on the basis of social class.

Selfishness: the American disease

People talk a lot about the growing divide between the rich and poor and, yes, it’s bad and getting worse. We can point our fingers here and there in blame, but the fundamental truth remains that the separation of wealth is, at bottom, caused by a pandemic of American selfishness. Self-interest constantly trumps the public good. So many us are looking out for number one, who’s left looking out for society as a whole? We’re so busy pampering ourselves and worrying about the quality of our lives, but what about the quality of our children’s lives? Or their children’s lives?

You don’t have to count the lobbyists in Washington to see what I’m talking about. Just look around. Who are the people behind the tinted glass in those gleaming Hummers-and who are the people in the dented Honda Civics? And if these two collide, you can guess who’s going to come out worse. This “I’ve got mine, screw the rest” dynamic played out on a massive scale in New Orleans in 2005. As Hurricane Katrina tore towards the coast, the ones with money got out. The ones without stayed and died, or rotted away in the Superdome while the rest of us watched from the safety of our homes. What a disgraceful chapter in our history.

All of the information I’ve gathered in this book, and all of the solutions I’ve spoken about will never make a real difference unless we come together as a country and start taking care of each other again. That’s the real revolution I’m talking about.

Could We Survive Another Depression?

I often wonder what would happen if America suffered another calamity like the Great Depression. I was born during that troubled time in our history. It branded me for life with the values of living humbly, saving for the future, and giving of yourself for the greater good. But now, those values have been lost. America has been on top of the world for so long now, too many generations have come and gone without having to face real hardship. That means no one is even willing to acknowledge the risks we’re taking with our future. We just want to keep our heads in the sand and pretend things are going to work out.

Maybe we need another meltdown, another economic and social hurricane to blow through and wash away all the greed, the stagnation, and the me-first attitude that has built up inside our country like so much mildew.

Think of it this way. For years, forestry officials and park rangers thought they had to do everything they could to prevent or at least minimize wildfires in our national forests. Anytime the smallest blaze broke out, they would send in huge teams of firefighters to put it out. But that approach never worked. By trying so hard to prevent fires, they actually caused more and more brush to accumulate. That made the fires that did start much larger than they would have been if we’d just let nature run her course.

Now scientists are starting to discover that wildfires are not bad things. Quite the opposite. They’re a necessary part of the ecosystem of forests. Many trees actually need fire for their seeds to germinate. Maybe our nation is like our forests. For too long, we’ve used short-term fixes to try to prevent disaster. But those short terms fixes have only delayed, and worsened, the inevitable.

Perhaps we need hardships like the recent housing crash, credit crunch, and the spike in gas prices in the same way forests need occasional conflagrations. Perhaps these challenges will burn through our selfishness and complacency and allow the seeds of new ideas and a renewed civic spirit to open up and grow. With every fiber of my being, I hope and pray that’s the case.

A Call to Action

As I said in the introduction, I wrote this book because the America I see around me today is not the America that gave me so much hope and opportunity as a young man. Greed, ignorance, and selfishness have metastasized from our political institutions in Washington DC to just about every part of our society. Worst of all, most Americans act like there’s nothing wrong. They swallow the bullshit big government, big media, and big business feed them and then timidly ask for second helpings. They don’t ask questions. They don’t make a fuss. They don’t challenge their leaders or “the way it is.”

Our political leaders work overtime to keep us in this state of blissful ignorance. They want us to be anesthetized, uneducated, pliant. But knowledge is power, as the old saying goes. And aside from pissing you off, I hope this book provided you with some powerful knowledge to see through their lies and distortions. In the end, though, just learning the truth isn’t enough. I don’t want this to be another book that you thumb through and forget. I desperately want it to inspire you to act.

I know some of the truths I’ve talked about are bleak and the task of setting things right seems daunting, even impossible. But we can’t let the enormity of the challenge discourage us from demanding a better America. This country can change. It can regenerate itself. I know it can. I have faith in it. Most importantly, I have faith in you, the American people to make it happen.

We don’t have to accept the status quo that our lifetime politicians, our government bureaucrats, and our greedy CEO’s love so well. They might own the country now, and the political process that controls it, but we can take it back from them. I’ve presented a few ideas on how it can be done. And in the last few pages, I present ten simple ways that you personally can make a difference. But I’m just one man. It’s going to take a lot more people than me with a lot more ideas to make it happen. And when I say “a lot more people,” I hope I can now include you in that number. It’s not too late. But we have to start working together, now, if we’re going to have a chance.