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Tuesday, March 29. 2011
No Joke!
Sunday morning my friend (he shall remain anonymous to protect his guilt) and I were discussing our national ignorance and American politics, the catalyst being Bill Maher’s assertion that Americans are dumb. Hard to disagree with Bill, especially since Newsweek came out with Its Story about a survey it conducted, asking Americans to take the test immigrants have to pass to become citizens. Thirty-eight per cent failed the test. Twenty-nine per cent didn’t know the name of our vice president (Joe Biden).Ignorance is the rule in America, not the exception. While many of us can quote lyrics from popular songs and dialogue from favorite TV shows or films, a large number of us couldn’t find our nation’s capital on a map, let alone name all 50 states. Thirty-three percent don’t know when Independence Day happens and 67% don’t know what took place at our Constitutional Convention. Those stats are astounding — fully 86% do not know how many voting members are in the House of Representatives (435) and 63% don’t know how many justices are on the Supreme Court. As much as it is in the news, you’d think …
Back to Sunday morning. My friend and I were talking about this, how Bill Maher has it right and how this willful ignorance has been promoted and exploited by the Teabagger movement and its ignorant leaders, like Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann. And its not so ignorant leaders, the people behind the scenes pulling the strings of the Teabaggers: Dick Armey and the Koch Brothers in particular. To the delight of the Teabaggers, Bachmann will no doubt enter the Republican primary to be president and with any luck she’ll win the nomination.
Sadly for the half-term governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, her star appears to be falling in the Republican-Tea Bag world. Maher got into a bit of controversy recently when he called Palin a “dumb twat.” Oh Bill, getting a bit misogynist — but his audience thought it was funny.
It was over the line, there was even a Facebook thingy people were posting on their walls denouncing Maher. The irony, no, the hypocrisy, is that some of these same people crabbing at Bill Maher have no problem spreading racially derogatory remarks and jokes about President Obama, even questioning — still — whether or not he was born in the United States. Hell, Donald Trump has even gotten into the act, trying to out birther the original birthers. Just watching the three clowns from the FOXNews morning show sit in rapt attention as Trump blabbered on about the president’s birth certificate is priceless! Gretchen Carlson, with that wide-eyed Stepford stare!
Poor Sarah Palin, the half-term governor, quit her job so she could make millions as a faux author, reality show star and on the speaking tour. Everyone is always picking on her and Bill Maher had to call her a dumb twat.
We all thought Palin brought national politics to a new low with her lack of qualification and knowledge to be a vice presidential candidate, but thankfully, up popped Michele Bachmann who is proving no person is too ignorant to run for president and with any luck, the equally ignorant who make up a big segment of the Teabagger crowd will have enough power to put either Bachmann or Palin at the top of the Republican ticket. Where can I help that cause, to paraphrase Bill Maher?
But yeah, you don’t want to call women politicians of the Republican-Teabag persuasion names like twat. Their followers get so vexed.
Sorry I take that back. It’s the comedian’s job to cross the line, especially with politics.
Returning to the rest of the ignorant crowd … so, my friend (who is NOT one of the ignorant crowd) says, somewhat sarcastically, that one of these clowns running for office might put forth a bill to change pi to 3. For those who may have failed the citizenship test, along with every math test you’ve ever taken since the eighth grade, “pi” is the mathematical constant of 3.14159265-ad infinitum. It’s an irrational number, which means it has no end, the most recent verifiable calculation having over five trillion digits. It is transcendent, meaning it cannot be equaled by any algebraic functions. Basically, pi is the ratio of a Euclidean plane circle’s circumference to its radius. If you’re looking for more on pi, go to Wikipedia.“So, why is pi, pi,” I ask my friend? And the above information came tumbling out of his mouth with typical (i.e. dry) engineering finality. You see, mathematicians, scientists and engineers just accept that pi is, so why would anyone question or even try to change it?
John, John, John, this is America and as Bill Maher stated, and we both agree, in America we’ve been busy dumbing down society, and education in particular, so more of us can pass the test. Except that, more of us are now failing the test than ever before. Nevertheless, we’ll dumb down everything. Why not change pi as well?
Sorry John, I couldn’t help myself.
There is a large segment of our population that believes evolution is false and instead believes in a deity first created over 5,000 years ago to explain the functions of the world (and universe) around us. And there are some locally powerful folks forcing public schools to teach that lie. And we wonder why U.S. students rank 26th in math and science education in the industrialized world, even though we spend more on education than any other nation.It isn’t the teachers, although there aren’t enough of them and there will be fewer still after Republicans (like Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin) cut state education budgets. That’s the paradox of this ignorance epidemic. For some reason (politics), Republicans think making the situation worse will somehow improve the situation. Basically, what conservatives want to do is end all public education and channel all that money to private schools, in particular, religious schools, a part of the community where the Republicans-Teabaggers find their political base.
The Teabagger-Republican crowd claims education should be left up to the individual states and the U.S. Department of Education should be abolished. But, if you ask any experts who actually study education policy and its trends, that is exactly opposite what we should be doing. According to experts who study education, both here in the U.S. and abroad, the main reason nations like Sweden, Great Britain, France, et al spend less on education per capita, but rank much higher than the U.S. in all categories is that all those countries have centralized education systems. In other words, the national government sets the curricula.
What do we do in this nation? We turn the education system into a test-passing system, void of intellectual curiosity. And then of course we have the nincompoops in states like Texas that mandate students are taught lies instead of science and, hard to believe, write Thomas Jefferson — the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence — out of American history! That’s his penance for coining the phrase, “separation of church and state.” The conservative idiots in Texas who wrote Jefferson out replaced him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. Huh?
Thomas Aquinas promoted the Catholic Church as the ruling political institution; i.e. he promoted a system of government similar to that of Iran, but with a Christian bent. Aquinas never made it to the New World, having died in 1274. Neither did John Calvin, whose claim to fame is starting another Christian cult that bears his name and for being the ruthless, brutal dictator of the Christian-based theocracy that was Geneva, Switzerland in the 16th Century. He employed the most horrific tortures on anyone who dared to question his teachings and authority. This is ironic! Calvin was French and we know what conservatives think of the French and Aquinas was a Papist! Maybe Texas conservatives are more open-minded than we give them credit for.
William Blackstone did have some influence on the United States. His writing on British Common Law was inspiration for many countries to adopt similar laws, the United States being the first. But, as far as I can tell, he never made it to the New World and, quite frankly, he was a Tory — a strict monarchist. That sort of flies in the face of what our Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, were accomplishing in the American Revolution.
It’s no wonder U.S. students and, consequently, our nation, are ignorant.And then of course there are the parents, over-worked and too stressed to pay as much attention to their children’s education as they should. For some, just spending the time they do with their kids’ educational needs is heroic, considering their lifestyle! If it isn’t a single mother trying to raise a family on too little money, then it’s a two-income family with both parents working, sometimes with one of them working two jobs to make ends meet; in essence, a three-income family.
And, let’s not forget, many of those single moms are two-income breadwinners.
So, my friend, no, it really isn’t beyond possibility that someone could and would propose to change pi through political fiat. Don’t even joke about it!
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