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When programs like Dancing with the Stars or American Idol become more important to a significant segment of the population than what is happening in the world around us everyday, we get Presidents like George W. Bush and we get Wall Street hijacking the American economy during the last 30 years of Republican hegemony.
This is why we have vast swaths of youth that prefer gangs, marijuana, semi-criminal-rhymthmic talking (called "music"aka rap or hip hop or 'beat' ) and when we have an epidemic of copulating teens having babies they can't support or care for during an economic downturn. Judging from national pop culture as seen on television, in the press and on the internet, 'twittering' has become more important to people than learning anything or being informed.
It stands to reason that our national decline despite the President's call to taking responsibility for our future, will most likely simply continue on downhill because we can't seem to tear ourselves away from the urge to be stupid and ignorant. And when we choose to be this way, it becomes easier to abdicate national policy to evil rulers who cause economic meltdowns simply because they are allowed by public apathy to get away with it.
The current multiple national crises themselves are not at the root of our problem: these crises are SYMPTOMS of a bigger problem: The dumbing down of our population.
We, the general public have turned off our engagement in the real world and have allowed others to hijack our future with credit default swaps, subprime mortgage meltdowns and designer wars fought in an environment of apathy and right wing propaganda supporting a jingoist government starting unnecessary wars and then charging them against the taxpayers to the Chinese credit card.
We have let these crimes and other other folly go unopposed and unchecked for a longer even than the last eight years. Our own people in general have engineered this kind of a world around us due to our own narcissism, passivity, ignorance apathy and taking the easy way out in most areas of our lives. We've been lulled to fall asleep at the wheel by "bread and circuses", as the Romans once called it. Inertia and selfishness and settling for being shallow has prevailed over reason, planning or hard work.
So unfortunately this all doesn't bode well for Obama's reforms to have any foundation from which his policies can take hold or get traction, when we have a public mindset like this, now made even less engaged and even more escapist because this mindset is made worse by the pressures and cares of job seeking, making ends meet and so forth...economic dislocation and pain tend to increase, not decrease, peoples' appetite for escapism because hardship provides for even less leisure time or sufficient mental energy
to study and learn about the different forces around them, including economic and politcal, that are shaping their lives.
As long as the economy is bad people will even moreso just react like three year old children frustrated in time out and hand Obama the whole responsibility of "fixing" things, while still letting charlatans like Rush Limbaugh fuel their generalized anger and will to blame SOMEONE for their problems. To make matters worse, the general
public will still depend on being spoon-fed standard, status-quo-corporate media-Republican-boiler-plate-clap-trap pushing the failed mantras of supply side economics and tax cuts for the wealthy (in the name of 'business') as still being the 'answer' to the economic mess, even though these failed ideas put us in the trouble we are in now.
In the absence of the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time requirements that were rescinded two decades ago, the newsmedia will continue to trumpet the Republican talking points and fail to investigate or expose the root failure of GOP mantras. But of course the media will continue to criticize and micro-critique every move Obama and the Demcrats in Congress make while trying to cope with the meltdown left by GOP malfeasance. The Republicans made the mess but the Democrats will continue to be "on trial" in the press pending time-sensitive quick solution of the all the national problems in a short amount of time. The press will decide whenthe pubic needs to begin to lose patience with Obama and his reforms. And since the mainstream media are consolidated under the thumb of right-wing corporate owners as soon as the public's anger with the GOP wears off a little, then the press will resume its role as 'enforcement' arm of Republican Party talking points, half-truths, lies and even slander. And the American public, rather than fact-checking will just continue to take the easier route of lapping the mainstream media's version of 'reality' as spoon fed them by corporate nightly propaganda-casts posing as 'news' to form their view of the world in general.
In the absence of public service broadcasting, Equal Time and the Fairness Doctrine, we will continue to be told what to think by the press and get treated to wall to wall coverage about Octo-mom and Landing on the Hudson (and other 'hobby horse' semi-tabloid journalistic 'stories' ) and what we care about and when we care about it will be dictated, as always, by the mainstream press.
God forbid we should cease to consume mainstream media's baby formula and begin to think for ourselves or even take an interest in learning, whether it be history, politics, ecomonics, the environment, the economy. green energy or global warming. The way we are now...that just makes our brain hurt to learn anything other than what happened on the lasted episode of "Lost".
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I despair of a country with no more work ethic, no residual brain and no interest in anything outside of daily materialism ever getting on the stick and competing with other countries in a global economy, let alone rebuilding the shambles of what the GOP and GW Bush left us to clean up.
With a population as selfish, opportunistic, shallow and dumbed down as ours has become, good luck.
