Politics

The old saw is that our democracy is hampered or obviated by the corruption of campaign finance and vested, monied interests.

True dat.  But it's really a red herring.  The real problem is ignorance which leads to indifference and apathy.  How many voters actually researched Obama or McCain's voting records or personal histories, versus simply accepting the narrative in the popular press?  Precious few, I'll reckon.

Matt Gonzalez (pictured above), San Francisco politician and lawyer, laid down the truth of Obama's record (in part) in his prescient article The Obama Craze: Count Me Out.  That was great, but how many people read it?  How many people are even capable of reading it?

The two-headed monster distracts us, entertains us, and gives the appearance of democracy to an ignorant, illiterate and apathetic populace, but it doesn't educate us, it doesn't address critical issues relevant to individual liberty, and ultimately, it serves only the donors who have hidden themselves on Obama's watch.  The "change we can believe in" has been the ascendancy of invisible government while the pundits sell cars and anti-depressants.

"With the renewal of physical existence goes,in the case of human beings, the recreation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. The continuity of any experience, through renewing of the social group, is a literal fact. Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on." - John Dewey, "Democracy and Education: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Education", 1916

Democracy is dependent upon its citizens' education in order for it to thrive.  When the citizenry is largely illiterate, or functionally illiterate in significant proportion, it becomes a show.  A democracy which fails to educate its citizens, which considers fine speech or deep understanding a luxury, rather than a necessity, is a society either consciously or unconsciously aiming at self-destruction.  Particularly at this time in history, where technology is exploding exponentially and altering profoundly our media, the ability to rapidly learn, understand and integrate new information is fundamental.  It's a baseline, without which a citizen cannot participate intelligently and becomes dependent upon the high priests of "news" shows to gather and interpret information for them.  In itself, however, literacy is not enough.  It is a first step, after which a citizen must learn to discern the difference between the product of fallacious logic and genuine information.  Without this second skill, we end up with people espousing patently false positions based on heated rhetoric of whichever high priest appeals most to the person's cultural upbringing.

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both shams, literal dog and pony shows to give the ostensible citizenry the feeling that they are participating in a democratic process while those very parties act as agents for multinational corporations, rather than as representatives of the people that they take an oath to serve.  When education is not at the very top of a nation's priorities, that nation cannot survive as a democracy.  The solution to the decline of the United States in terms of performance in the worldwide economy, continuation of technological superiority of its armed forces, halting its process towards unchecked executive power in service of multinational corporations begins with education.  Beyond that there are issues of transparency, the widening separation of classes (and disappearance of the middle class), decay of infrastructure, ballooning debt service, etc., but having those debates with ignorant and functionally illiterate people is a joke.

Who is laughing?