If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren’t Millions of Americans Happy?

Perhaps there was some kind of omen when Y. E. Yang of South Korea won the PGA Golf championship a month ago when he beat Tiger Woods, the best golfer in the world, and Padraig Harrington, the best European golfer. There just isn’t any doubt that Asia is preparing to do to us what Yang did to “our” boys. Tiger lost the lead at the end, Paddy simply collapsed, getting an eight on a par 3 hole, and Yang made an amazing shot on 18 that Tiger didn’t even have the guts to try.

Richard Haass in a Newsweek article “The Geopolitics of Golf” has used the game of the frustrating little white ball to remind us that we probably will not be playing in the championship flight in the future. Haass reminds us that while Asia in general is going to grow by five percent this year and China by eight, we will be in negative territory until 2010. He uses golf courses to teach us a valuable lesson. The U.S. with about 12,000 courses closed more courses than it opened in 2008. Europe is actually in worse shape than we are – both in golf and in economics.

After spending 11 years and billions of dollars pounding the hell out of the Viet Cong in a fruitless, stupid domino game mainly devised by the Dulles brothers, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, we left the South Vietnamese on the embassy grounds in Saigon while running for our helicopters on the embassy roof. Now the Ho Chi Minh Trail has been turned into the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail featuring numerous five-star luxurious golf courses and resorts. I wonder if the course designers included all of our bomb craters as sand traps on the courses. South Korea now has 234 courses where Yang developed his game. ‘Tis rumored North Korea has only three courses. Kim would say golf is so “bourgeois.”

While Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is closing courses because the upper middle-class and rich use them instead of the poor, Raul and Fidel Castro are busy developing Cuban courses so they can get in on the tourist trade from Europe and the U.S. When the idiotic Helms-Burton embargo-trade ban is lifted many Cubans will be learning what “Fore!” means.

Several Eurasia communist countries are building golf courses. China has over 300 and is opening others almost daily. (Remember, the Chinese open a new power plant every week.) Naturally China has one-upped us again by having the largest golf club in the world, boasting 12 separate courses. Even Kashmir has five golf courses in that beautiful valley between screwed-up nuclear Pakistan and cataclysmic-nuclear India.

We Are Only #1 in Two Areas – Annual Deficit and Total Debt

When President “Slick Willie” Clinton and the “inventor of the internet” Vice-President Al Gore left office in 2001 we were third in the world among 30 advanced countries in the installation and use of broadband and the internet. In fact, Clinton and Gore were often filmed helping workers install lines in school buildings so K-12 schools and students would have access to broadband and the internet.

When the uncurious George W. Bush left office in 2009 the U.S. had slipped to 16th in the short span of eight years. Of course, when dealing with technology the generations are very short, but the Republican president and congress evidently didn’t give a damn about the greatest advance in educational and communications technology ever devised by man.

In a recent United Nations Communication Technology survey North European countries and South Korea have the most advanced telecom systems and computer development in the world. Sweden, that socialist country that also insures every living soul’s health, came out on top in computer development, with South Korea, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Norway close behind. Sweden and South Korea also lead the world in cellphone use. Such powerful countries as Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Japan are ahead of the U.S.

Our Miserable, Ignorant Record in Broadband

Only 57 percent of our people have access to broadband and only 9 percent have dial-up internet access. Why can’t we have greater access when 50 percent of our population live and work within a mile of the oceans and gulfs? Only another 9 percent use the internet at work or at a library – but not at home. Compared to the rest of the civilized, industrialized world we are truly computer illiterates.

To make a point, let’s compare the daily “computer” life of a typical family in Seoul, South Korea. The mother works across town so she must leave for her job first. She hops on a bus, uses a computer card with a radio-frequency-identification chip (RFID) that calculates the distance she travels on any public transit and charges her account. If she decides to take a taxi home she uses the same card. Her transportation costs are automatically deducted from her bank account at the end of the month.

Her husband lives closer to his job so he drives their car to work. But he has made a deal with the city to use public transportation once a week instead of driving the car. He had filled out an application on their home computer for an RFID card which was then sent to him by mail. He attached the card to his windshield, indicating compliance. He saves $50 a month in transportation costs because the city’s reimbursement program keeps 10,000 cars off the road per day. Such a program relieves the air pollution and traffic congestion in one of Asia’s busiest cities.

Fully 95 percent of South Korean homes have broadband compared to our 51 percent. 88 percent of Singapore homes have broadband. With this great access, broadband has changed how city government does its business in South Korea. All bids for city supplies and work are put on the internet. Such transparency has virtually eliminated corruption in competitive bidding in most South Korean cities. Seoul has been named “the world’s most efficient and advanced e-government” by a UN-sponsored government evaluation agency.

Why Not Pick Up A Real Estate Deed On The Way Home?

South Korean citizens can stop at government kiosks in the city and get documents of almost any transaction they have made, including Social Security certificates, real estate and vehicle registrations. They can even check air quality and pollution in their neighborhood by internet and cellphone. Well over 50 percent of South Koreans do all of their banking by cellphone, paying all bills by the internet. Most restaurants have wired their tables so it is not necessary to call or wave helplessly at a waiter. Touch a simple device and the waiter receives the message on another and knows what table is making contact.

Citizens with special health problems can request to be placed on an alert system run by the city. As an example, citizens with respiratory problems are notified by cellphone of ozone and air pollution alerts wherever they are in the city. They are also informed about the best route home in case of traffic congestion.

Seoul also has developed U-Safety Zones for school children. Parents attach a special chip called a U-Tag to their children’s backpack. If the child leaves his prescribed route on the way to school or home an alarm is automatically triggered and the parents and the police are instantly notified. The program is voluntary.

Almost all new apartment and home construction in South Korea features home networks already wired in every room. This allows all electronic devices in the home to be operated by cellphone or other devices outside the home. Heat, light, TVs, stoves, coffee makers and other convenience items can all be operated by the press of a key.

All of these advances make us look positively medieval.

We Are Rapidly Becoming a Third World Country in High-Speed Internet Access

Computers can be the difference between an educated and informed society and one that carries guns, Hitler images and swastikas, and African witch doctor pictures at health care and political rallies. If we don’t make high-speed internet available to 95 percent of our citizens as South Korea has done, we will no longer be the world superpower.

China has over a billion people with 300 million with internet access. The Chinese know that if they surpass us in the use of computers and broadband they will be the most powerful economic, military, and political force in the world. Our politicians, concentrating on God, guns and gays instead of computer education and broadband and our supremacy, will return us to the 19th century.

During one of Adlai Stevenson’s campaign speeches in a run against Dwight Eisenhower a woman yelled at him: “Governor, you have the support of every thinking American!” He responded: “That’s nice, but I need a majority!” That’s one of our problems when it comes to computer use.

I recently switched from dial-up to high-speed broadband. I have been using computers for over 20 years in my different professions. I have been writing columns and magazine articles for decades. The transformation to high-speed is life-enhancing. I can now do research in a quarter of the time it used to take. Each morning I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Minneapolis Tribune. I also search Google News for other articles. It takes about an hour.

Last week there were 40 billion web pages of information available on the Internet. When I punch in the High Plains Reader website I get 590,000 reference points in less than a second. When I email my column to about 100 people scattered across the U.S. it takes about two seconds. It is still profitable for businesses to get one response for 12,414,000 emails sent online!

Just for laughs I punched in my name the other day and discovered that there were 5.15 million references to me and other Ed Raymonds in the country. I remember when Corky asked me to go online to check to see if baking powder was used in a recipe for German Chocolate cake. I got 590,000 references in .02 seconds. I am shocked that 37 percent of seniors do not use a computer and that 33 percent of the population do not even have an interest in using the internet or email. Think of how it may retard Alzheimer’s. No wonder our students can’t keep pace with Asian students.

Broadband Is the Best Investment We Could Make for the Future

We are also falling so far behind in computer technology and the general area of electronics and nanotechnology I’m afraid we will never dominate in this crucial field. We are 15th in internet speed according to the Communications Workers of America. As an example, a Japanese citizen can download a movie in two minutes, utilizing a download speed of 63.6 megabits per second. A U.S. citizen would take two hours to download the same film! In download speed, South Korea, Finland, France and Canada rank next to Japan. Can’t we be first in something besides total debt, McMansions, and Prozac use?

It would take about $30 billion to bring high-speed broadband to most Americans, with a small investment for each individual or family. But big tax cuts for the rich and debts for two wars our grandchildren will have to pay won’t do it for us. A letter to the editor of Harper’s magazine helps to illustrate our problem: “Rather than tax Bill Gates enough to stock our school libraries, we tax him at a lower rate than his secretary and hope he finds it in his heart to donate some books. Increasingly, the schools in our wealthiest districts set up ‘local educational foundations,’ funded by parents and local businesses, so that when a student in the district takes up the tuba, the instrument is purchased by the fund; whereas in a poor district for a student to do the same, her parent has to buy it – perhaps by taking out a payday loan.”

I think it is a little ironic that Gates has garnered an individual nest egg of about $60 billion, give or take a few billion, depending upon the markets and other investments, from the computer business. That’s exactly twice of what it would take to bring broadband to every poor student in America.

*Correction: In my enthusiasm for comparing the Republican Party to the cannabalistic Donner Party I used a statement about a person who “et” a few Democrats in Colorado. Alfred Packer was the party who “et” four of them. Packer was not part of the Donner Party. He was a member of a group of miners who got greedy over a mine and traveled in the mountains during the winter when they shouldn’t have. These lines are from The Ballad of Alfred Packer:

“Oh Alfred Packer you’ll surely go to Hell / While others starved to death you dined a bit too well.”

Thanks to the readers who corrected me.

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