The Dumbing Down of America

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
We used to call persons with “genius” abilities but physical and mental disabilities idiot savants. These are people who often can’t speak, or can’t button their shirt, or can’t use a zipper, or have the symptoms of severe autism, but can do marvelous, glorious things in music, art, mathematics, calendar counting, or other challenging pursuits. Because these people are not idiots (a blockhead or a person in the lowest intellectual range) we now describe them as persons with a Savant (a learned scholar, a wise man) Syndrome.

Now we have a strong minority of persons in the United States who have resurrected the term “idiot” by totally ignoring common facts in making judgments in their daily lives. We can call it the Mad Kowtow Tea Party Disease with complications of idiot syndrome. Recent polls indicate that 47 percent of Republicans believe that President Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, although all of the available evidence indicates he is a Christian. As the number of geniuses with Savant Syndrome is extremely limited, I can only deduce that those who believe Obama is a Muslim are idiots. 

Fully 27 percent of Republicans also believe that he is not a citizen of the United States, although two major Hawaiian newspapers carried notices of his birth in that wonderful state and the state office has a registered birth certificate. Copies of Obama’s birth certificate have been sent to so many “birthers’ making that request that Hawaii has now placed a limit on the requests so employees can get other work done.

There aren’t that many savants in this relatively large group either, so we have a lot more idiots running loose in this country. Birthers avoid scientific facts. Remember when a Minnesota woman stood up at a John McCain rally in Minneapolis and said: “He’s not (a citizen)–he’s an Arab!” Even McCain had to say: “No, Ma’am, he’s a decent family man, a citizen.”  The poor woman had exposed her idiocy to a national audience.
Have We Changed Much From Our Cannibalistic Ancestors?
A recent anthropological study conducted by a university in Spain reveals that our ancestors of a million years ago often turned to cannibalism to satisfy their nutritional needs. Refuse piles near their caves contained tools, animal bones, and many examples of human bones containing “cut marks, peeling, and percussion marks often seen after skinning, defleshing, dismembering ...and marrow extraction.” 

Our history indicates that man has turned to cannibalism on numerous occasions in our past–witness the Donner Party meals, the survivors of the plane crash in the Chilean Mountains, and Jeffrey Dahmer in his Milwaukee apartment. From our Neanderthal ancestors we learned that it was sometimes to our political and nutritional advantage to eat our enemies.  And the beat goes on.

The recent brouhaha over the building of the Muslim mosque two blocks north of the World Trade Center has most Republicans eating their young while they dumb down their intellectual level to idiocy.  Few seem to remember that of the 2800 Americans who died in Osama bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center, over 300 of the dead were Muslims. Few seem to remember that there already is a busy although small Muslim mosque only about three blocks from the “hallowed” site. No one seems to remember that in a Pentagon chapel only a few feet from where the passenger liner crashed into the hallways, Muslims have been worshipping for years along with other members of the world’s great religions led by Pentagon chaplains, Christian, Bhuddist, Muslim, and Jewish.

But we have the likes of the Becks, Palins, and Limbaughs who “entertain” us with lies, innuendo, and their twisted ideas of history. Every day these propagandists laugh all the way to bank, thanking the suckers who say “Ditto!” 

They teach that Islam is a religion of hate, forgetting that Tomas de Torquemada of the Spanish Grand Inquisition burned over 3,000 Roman Catholic ”heretics” at the stake and that eight abortion doctors have been killed carrying out the laws of the land by Christian fundamentalists.
They say Muslims are out to destroy Christianity, forgetting that Christian Crusaders disemboweled over 3,000 Muslims in Jerusalem, filling the streets ankle-deep with blood. Our crusader boys also sang “Christ, We Adore Thee” while burning Jews alive.

They say there are 20 jihadi training camps hidden in rural America, teaching the young to carry suicide bombs. I wonder why they don’t picket and protest around these camps instead of the Washington Mall.

They say Muslims murder their children. Christians don’t? Remember the Houston Christian fundamentalist mother who drowned her five children in her bathtub?

They say we should keep Muslims out of our country because our children have enough to worry about, particularly drugs, alcohol, and pornography.
Maybe Glenn Beck Is Hoping the Rapture Will Take Place
I watched the flag-wrapped Beck for a few minutes as he was spouting religion, patriotism, and brotherhood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He seemed to be hoping for the “Rapture” so all the Democrats would have to cope with the hell on earth.

Bob Herbert of the NY Times has the best short description of Faux News Beck: “Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation. He seems oblivious to the real danger of his execrable behavior.” 

Beck has described Obama as a man “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people and the white culture. I think the president is a racist.  He is moving all of us quickly to slavery. He is seeking to settle old racial scores.”  Beck adds: “He chose to use the name Barack for a reason, to identify, not with America–you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America.

My name is Edward Alva Raymond. I didn’t have damn thing to do with it. I can’t imagine that Barack had much to do with his name either. If you do, I think you qualify as an idiot.

You take the name Barack to identify, with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?  Is that a fact? Is Obama’s father a radical? Even if he is, so what?

Is America really “A Planet of the Apes” as you have described it? Are black people apes, chimps, or bonobos? Beck even told a whole string of lies about Michelle Obama, claiming we taxpayers were paying for “40 of her best friends to vacation in 60 rooms at a five-star Spanish hotel.”  She took two friends and their daughters.They paid their own expenses.

At Tea Party rallies and meetings Obama has been greeted with the cries of “Socialist,” “Marxist,”“Go back to Kenya,” “He’s no African lion, he’s a lyin’ African,” “cokehead-in-chief,” and posters with him dressed up as a black witch doctor. (Is he really a flesh-eating zombie socialist?)

There are signs about no more bailouts or stimulus laws. No wonder 50 percent of Republicans believe that Obama was responsible for the passage of the TARP legislation that bailed out the banks and numerous insurance companies. Obama did vote for it. Sorry, true believers, but your own President Lurch was president and signed TARP when it was passed.
Are You Equipped With Enough Facts to Comprehend The Present?
Trash Limbo,the man “with half a brain tied behind his back,” conceives and tells lies as if they were engraved on stone tablets.  Where is the truth in this statement: “Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday—not that we’ve seen any proof of that. They tell us August 4th is his birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”  If you don’t believe notices in two state newspapers or the evidence in the birth registrar’s office, what does that make you? It probably makes you a big fat idiot.

Why does Trash ask this question: “Obama says he’s a Christian, but where’s the evidence?”  (Obama went to a Christian church in Chicago for 20 years, was married there, and had his children baptized there, just like any good Muslim would.) Trash refers to Obama as “Iman Obama,” but then says: “I’m just throwing things out there, folks, because people are questioning his Christianity.”  Are you one of the 47 percent who believe he is Muslim?  If you do, classify yourself as an idiot because you are totally ill-equipped to comprehend the present.

The Rev. Franklin Graham embarrasses his father Billy with this statement: “Obama was born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed from his father.”  Geez! You mean his mother’s Christian uterus had nothing to do with it?  I think Franklin needs to take a course in genetics.
Is Franklin Graham any better than the evangelical preacher Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, who has decided to memorialize September 11 by having a bonfire of Korans because it’s “full of lies?”  With a total of 50 members, his church is known as the Dove World Outreach Center.
The dove is often used as a symbol of peace–but it also craps over everything. Take your choice here.

This continuing derogation of Muslims is very damaging to our relationships with Muslims in this country and the world.  There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, with over 7 million in this country.  Over 200,000 have made Minnesota their home. One of our representatives is a Muslim. There are 100 mosques in New York City alone and over 1,900 in the U.S.
With this right-wing wacko drumbeat about the “shariafied” Muslims, now we have an ever-increasing number of Americans who are not accepting Muslims as citizens.  Twenty-eight percent of voters are opposed to having Muslims serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, while over 30 percent think members of Islam should be barred from running for president.

Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly sums it up: “The more the president’s support falters, the more ‘Muslim’ he appears in the eyes of his critics. As a cultural matter, this is insane. As a political matter there doesn’t appear to be much anyone can do to convince Americans that the president is not, in fact, a secret Muslim.” 

Ignorance hurts us all.  Madame Curie worked with radioactive materials until she died of them in 1934. She didn’t know they could kill because she was ignorant of their long-lasting power. The gloves she wore and the notebooks she used for her experiments over 75 years ago are still so “hot” they cannot be touched.

Hebrews Bible Reading: “Keep Your Lives Free From the Love Of Money, and Be Content With What You Have”

There are three billionaires who basically support the Tea Parties and the other right-wing organizations that constantly oppose the Obama administration in its attempt to have the nation recover from the eight-year economic and war debacle of George W. Bush.  The three place the love of money above anything else in their lives, even including family.  Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation gives millions of dollars to right-wing political causes and hires such luminaries as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck to pontificate against Obama on his Fox News network.

David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries are worth about $35 billion from oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota and over 4,000 miles of pipelines. They also own Brawny (paper towels), Georgia-Pacific Lumber, Dixie Cups, Stainmaster Carpets, Lycra, and other companies.  They have given hundreds of millions of dollars to the Metropolitan Opera, American Ballet Theatre, Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and other institutions.  They have also been named one of the top air polluters in the U.S. and the top funder for the opposition forces of climate change, even greater than Exxon and BP. They front so many legislation-fighting groups they are known as Kochtopus. They spend billions of dollars fighting attempts to control oil pollution and have only one main interest: keeping money flowing to Koch Industries.

They fund Americans for Prosperity Foundation (oil lobby), Texas Defending the American Dream (Texas Tea Party), the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis, the John Birch Society (the group that accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist), the libertarian magazine Reason, and the Freedom School (teaching that the New Deal was “a terrible mistake”). The Koch propaganda machine constantly rants against Social Security, the minimum wage, health programs, gun control, personal and corporate income taxes, and wants to legalize prostitution.  The two Kochs are often called “the billionaires behind the hate.”
Combined with Murdoch and his Fox News, the Kochs give truth to H.L. Mencken’s adage that “no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” They absolutely love the money.

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