Friday, December 21, 2007

Greetings from Idiot America


Creationism. Intelligent Design. Faith-based this. Trust-your-gut that. There's never been a better time to espouse, profit from, and believe in utter, unadulterated crap. And the crap is rising so high, it's getting dangerous.
In the summer of 1977 just before the birth of our first daughter, my ex wife and I were back in my home town in northern Wisconsin. We were driving on Allen Street near the Red Cedar River bridge in late afternoon on a summer Saturday. As we approached the bridge we saw three humongous pick up trucks coming from a trailer court near the river. Each pick up was pulling an equally humongous race car being pulled out to the local "speed pit" for the ritual Saturday night races. By my estimate each of the race cars and the trucks pulling them were of greater value than the trailer houses these folks called home.

As we watched this parade, my ex wife made one of the more profound statements of her life. She pointed out that in the long run it was a mistake for she and I to adhere to the goal of zero population growth. Her concern was that while we would replace ourselves with two children, folks like the drivers of these three pick up trucks would be breeding like rabbits and soon they would be the majority and running the show while educated people would be the minority.

History has since shown my ex wife to be "spot on" as the Brits would say. You need look only as far as the clientele that watches Fox News religiously to see that she was right. This story from Esquire only reinforces her correct prognostication 30 years after the fact.

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