Stuck on Stupid

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By David Glenn Cox (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: David Glenn Cox - Writer

Hello, everyone. My name is Dave and I'm a news junkie.

"Hi, Dave," the room answers.

I come from a family of addicts. Even as a child my parents gave me books and magazines, and even a dictionary. So at this stage in my life I feel I'm too far gone for help. It started innocently enough, sports trivia, but before I knew it I was hooked on facts. I read encyclopedias in the dark under my blanket with a flashlight, and when I found a name that I'd never heard of I would remember it and study up on it.

Benjamin Disraeli, Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon. Then I started having trouble in school. The teacher would ask a question and when I would raise my hand the teacher would say, “Would anyone besides David like to answer the question?” It was only facts that I was hooked on, and I wasn't so bad.

But I was terrible in math, so didn't that balance it out? I was ok in science; I knew that Madame Curie discovered radium and died from radiation sickness. I knew that Louis Pasture invented pasteurization and that the cure for small pox came from studying cow pox, but when you started to do the math problems, I became very quiet.

Then, when I was in high school I got a job at the high school radio station. News copy straight off the feed. Before I knew it I was main lining the Associated Press. Reams of copy and it was free!

I read that Churchill's favorite book was Gibbon's, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” so I went to the library and read the first volume. When I went back the second volume was checked out; that's when I knew that I was hooked. I had to have that book! I woke up in the morning wondering if it had been checked back in. I went to sleep at night thinking, you moron! Finish the damn book!

Then I did the unthinkable, I asked for it for Christmas. My parents thought it was so funny, when they were the ones who had gotten me hooked on this shit in the first place. “Wouldn't you rather have a new baseball glove or a basketball?”

I got the books; I've read them twice. Then I found Churchill's five volume “The Second World War.” From there I went to “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” which took me to “Berlin Diary” and finally back to Albert Spear's “Spandau Diary.”

Then it was on to the Etruscans and the Greeks, and that led me to prehistory because once they've got you hooked on facts you stay hooked. I was on a steady diet of an ever-expanding maze of history and facts. I took the National Geographic geography test and correctly named all the world capitals, but a closer investigation of the instructions prompted me to slow down as they only wanted the name of the country and not the capitals.

I was no fun at parties. As soon as they pulled out Trivial Pursuit I had to leave or else I would be discovered. For fun I once entered a trivia contest in a bar. It was just for fun, right? I won fifty bar bucks but had to spend it another night because of all the hard looks I was getting. I can't help it! My parents made me this way! If you say longest river in the world, I can't help myself. It just pops out, “the Nile.” Or tallest mountain in North America? Mount McKinley, discovered by George Vancouver in 1794, the same Vancouver that the city is named after. Oh God, I can't stop. I need help!

Then, when the Internet was invented I, like millions of Americans, found myself searching websites for" Who said porn? No, I was hanging out in the Louvre and checking out items from the Vatican library. I began to read newspapers from all over the world. That's when it all started to go bad and began to spiral out of control. American news sites started cutting the good stuff with infotainment. I just couldn't get off on it anymore, and I started going into withdrawal.

I wanted the war news and the news from the budget hearings, but all I could get were stories about Roman Polanski and his thirty-year-old rape charges. I wanted stories about the guy being prosecuted who left office ten months ago. Then I saw a story, “Will Miley Cyrus bump off The Black Eyed Peas?” Oh, God, I think I'm going to be sick. Miley Cyrus was invented by Disney! She's a character like Scooby Doo; reasonable adults don't ask if Scooby Doo could be the next Hollywood break out artist. He's a cartoon, for God sakes.

I watched the tea baggers and the birthers and all I could think was that maybe someone is putting something in the water. Maybe those chem-trails that they are always talking about are full of stupid dust? I admit it, I read the story about the desecration of Ted Williams corpse. I'm guilty but what was more shocking than corpse desecration was the attitude of a New York newspaper that thought it was funny because Williams played for the Red Sox! Come here, let me slap you like your mother should have! It's a dead body and it doesn't matter who it played baseball for in life, because only sick people desecrate dead bodies!

David Letterman sex scandal! What sex scandal? He had consensual sex with a woman and they tried to blackmail him. That's not a scandal, it's a crime! Letterman is a comedian, not the Pope. People are going to tell jokes about him and like a comedian he will laugh them off. He's in the comedy business; he knows how the game is played.

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I who am I? Born at the pinnacle of American prosperity to parents raised during the last great depression. I was the youngest child of the youngest children born almost between the generations and that in fact clouds and obscures who it is that I (more...)

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