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Jewish World Review Jan 3, 2012/ 8 Teves, 5772 Don't die stupid By Cal Thomas
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | A friend of mine hands me what looks like a business card. It says, "Don't Die Stupid." As America begins another round of voting to select the next president, or retain the current one, what we need is a stupid test. Flunk it and you shouldn't vote. Evidence of the dumbing-down of America is everywhere. Some of it is chronicled in a new book, "Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America" by Flynn contends popular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. He has plenty of examples in case television, texting, video games and improper use of English ("she was like and then I was like") are not enough. Flynn calls the digital age that has sped up the process by which we receive information "Idiotville," because it has made us less intelligent. "Stupid is the new smart," writes Flynn. He says we arrived at this lower level of brain activity because as recently as the last century "the everyman aspired to high culture and ... intellectuals descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman." Today, he says, "Those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation." That has left the nonintellectual class to fend for itself. One library in Flynn quotes from "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" is the slogan of the
Here's a potent example of what Flynn means when he writes about the destruction of our minds: "At the tony "It is, and '1984,' too," comments Flynn. "In place of the twenty thousand discarded books, the school spent The solution? Get rid of the books. Don't get kids interested in books when they'd rather play "World of Warcraft," or if younger, watch cartoons, which can't be that different from "The Canterbury Tales," right? Our intellectual depth increasingly resembles floor wax; shiny on top, but lacking depth. A muscle atrophies if it is not used. Similarly, a mind becomes lazy if it is not well fed. And a weak mind dumbs-down our politics. We elect people we come to dislike because too many of us require no more of them than we require of ourselves. We then wonder why little seems to work and the country soon suffers. In Like, ya know, man, that's just the way it is. Like, ya know what I'm sayin'?
JWR contributor Cal Thomas is co-author with Bob Beckel, a liberal Democratic Party strategist, of "Common Ground: How to Stop the Partisan War That is Destroying America". Comment by clicking here.
© 2011, Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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