Watching
Glenn Beck's performance Saturday at his "Restoring Honor" rally in
Washington, DC, I thought of the novelist Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry,
the charlatan evangelist who seduces most of those around him with his
hearty backslapping and false piety.
Then I realized it wasn't Gantry of whom I was reminded so much as
another Lewis character, Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the politician who
poses as a populist, then once elected president turns the United States
into a fascist dictatorship, aided by an angry, unknowing electorate
and a paramilitary group called the Minute Men.
Read how Sinclair Lewis described Windrip seventy-five years ago in his novelIt Can't Happen Here
and think Beck: "He was an actor of genius. There was no more
overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the
pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit
Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing
mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would
coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts
-- figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened,
they were entirely incorrect."
Entirely incorrect. In its despair and confusion, a large segment of the
American populace is prepared to believe anything it's told, in part
because we are a country less and less educated, increasingly unable to
tell fact from fiction because we are so unschooled in basic essential
knowledge about America and the world/
I remembered a conversation my friend and colleague Bill Moyers had with journalist and author Susan Jacoby on Bill Moyers Journal in 2008, just after the publication of her book, The Age of American Unreason.
She cited a 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey: "Only 23 percent of
college-educated young people could find Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and
Israel, four countries of ultimate importance to American policy on the
map -- a map, by the way, that had the countries lettered on it. So in
other words, it wasn't a blank map, [which] meant they didn't really
know where the Middle East was either... If only 23 percent of people
with some college can find those countries on a map that is nothing to
be bragging about. And that has to have something to do with why, as a
country, we have such shallow political discussions."
It's not much of a leap from there to the Pew Research Center survey
earlier this month reporting "nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say
Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of
adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009."
The jump in the "Obama is a Muslim" numbers is sharpest among Republicans (and a new Newsweek
poll finds a majority of Republicans also believe that it's
"definitely" or "probably" true that "Barack Obama sympathizes with
Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the
world"). But as New York Times
blogger Timothy Egan noted in an entry headlined, "Building a Nation of
Know-Nothings," it's "not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe
the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt
that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of
them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance
companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush."
Back when Moyers spoke with Susan Jacoby about "the ignorance and
erosion of historical memory that makes serious deceptions possible and
plausible," she cited as an example that, "If we don't know what our
Constitution says about the separation of powers then it certainly
affects the way we decide all kinds of public issues."
According to a survey conducted last year by The American Revolution
Center, a non-partisan, educational group, more than half of American
adults "mistakenly believe the Constitution established a government of
direct democracy, rather than a democratic republic," a third don't know
that the right to trial-by-jury is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and
"many more Americans remember that Michael Jackson sang 'Beat It' than
know that the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution." (Sixty
percent knew that reality TV's Jon and Kate Gosselin had eight kids but
more than a third did not know that the American Revolution took place
in the 18th century.)
So is it any wonder that many Tea Partiers are equally unknowing of the
fact that much of their grass roots movement is bankrolled by fat cats
with ulterior motives like billionaire libertarians David Koch and his
brother Charles, who, as a former associate told The New Yorker's
Jane Mayer, seems to have "confused making money with freedom?" Or that
continuing tax cuts for the rich while supporting deficit reduction are
inherently incompatible concepts? Or that raging Islamophobia plays
right into the hands of radical terrorists who use our bigotry to incite
and recruit? Or that Glenn Beck just says whatever craziness pops into
his head?
"It's one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes," Timothy Egan wrote on the Times website. "But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?"
Years ago, I attended a rally protesting government cuts in funding for
education and the arts. One of the speakers suggested that we boomers
may be the first generation to teach the next generation less than we know. That often-willful ignorance may turn out to be our final, fatal mistake, the greatest American tragedy of all.
