The ignorance death-spiral

Monday: dark, overcast, and colder. The weather won't be playing much of a range today, with a current temperature of 51° and a projected late afternoon high of only 59°. Still, that is mild weather to most of the world, and I am not complaining. It is the first fall weekday I have pulled a sweater on over my shirt. Probably won't want it all day, but I did this morning.

The local football team had a 10:00 AM game this Sunday, so Melissa made the has-become-traditional cheddar, feta, jalapeño, and bacon quiche that serves as brunch for morning games. That means a small slice comes with me for breakfast today, too. Very worthy!

Pizza Hut was advertising during the ball games yesterday, running an ad in which they promised to have simplified the menu, made it easier for people to follow, and eliminated "math problems" by, apparently, rounding all the prices to an even $10 bill.

This is what a major U.S. Corporation now feels it has to promise to consumers during prime placement high cost advertising on national television. They might as well come out and say, "We know the average American consumer can't manage basic addition and subtraction (especially if they have to carry any digits from one column to another), so we have made a menu even an American can understand. All pictures and easy round numbers.

Political attack ads, all dumbed down to the lowest common denominator (sorry - that's one of those nasty math-based metaphors!) and all deceptive and manipulative with the truth, made up a large chunk of game time advertising, displacing at least some of the obligatory truck and beer commercials. Again, trading on the perception that most Americans either can't be trusted with the truth or won't recognize the truth, the political ads were sensational, fear-mongering, garbage. They run because the pollsters know they make a difference, most Americans are influenced by this stuff.

Reminds me of a story I heard on NPR the other day. An author was observing that until she had children of her own she was of the opinion that you should never lie to a child. She gave the example of her child pointing to a picture in a magazine of lynched people and asking what that was. She had, of course, lied and said they were puppets rather than try and tackle the painful truth with a very young child. So, apparently, agree the leaders of our corporatocracy. Children, can you say pup-pets? Very good!

With midterm elections only a few weeks away, and with a string of initiatives on our state ballot aimed at further reducing state revenue and funded by large corporate interests, in the middle of an historic budget deficit, and given the clear inference of the pizza and political ads from yesterday, I am very concerned about what the next several years will bring.

The iPod was also in somber mood is morning, though each tune grew progressively more upbeat until we were rocking to the driven electrified blues of Rocco Deluca as I pulled into a parking place someplace off the main campus of the college I work for. A college that has to be concerned about the midterm elections and their likely impact on state revenue, a college that is trying to offer enough pre-college instruction to bring record numbers of unemployed students up to entry-level math and English so they can pursue new dreams of employment, a college that has already lost nearly 25% of its state funding and has been told to brace for even deeper state budget cuts in the coming biennium.

Does this spiral feel like it is going the wrong direction to anyone else? Dickens said it all those years ago. To paraphrase: fear Ignorance and Want, and fear Ignorance most of all, though the two seem to be inexorably linked wherever the interests of the few are set above those of the rest.

Patrick Cassidy: The Violent Death of the Sons of Uisnech and Deirdre
Jake Shimabukiro: Ave Maria
Fountains of Wayne: Utopia Parkway
Mark Knopfler: Remembrance Day
Rocco Deluca & the Burden: Soul


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