As Americans I think we should overlook the stupidity around us in an effort to examine our own shortcomings as a culture and to give us some way to reinvent ourselves… or we could just use the stupidity around us as a cautionary tale to be avoided rather than to emulate. Nah, we just like dumb shit and being dumb so lets just do that…
I talked about this on some level in a very early installment of
Sanity Is Razor Thin but those early installments were terrible and so much has changed in this field that I feel I must revisit this. Lets get down to the reality of the situation here in the US, we just love the dumb and we love to laugh at the dumb. It gives us a minor glimpse of something that (we hope) is worse then our own particular reality. Why do we love the Honey Boo Boo’s and the Big Bang Theory’s while we hate a show like Charlie Jade? Why does
Transformers: Dark of the Moon make 100 times the money that
John Dies At The End makes? Why does
Twilight sell more copies in a single year than
Neuromancer has over it’s entire lifetime? Why do you care more about who is voted off Big Brother than you do who is curing cancer? Why do you prefer a false sense of reality to the genuine thing? If it is to hide from real life, even for a small while, then all you are doing it allowing that crushing falsehood you have inserted yourself into… to win.
Latching onto the dumb in society makes you feel superior and when you feel superior you give yourself the illusion (no matter how fleeting) of being closer to the top than to the bottom. Getting invested in the lives of teenage sluts on TV, living and breathing the tweets of movie stars or devoutly buying People magazine instead of Mother Jones allows for a break in the rather dark reality we all live in, whether you want to or not. How does a has-been game show castoff such as Jenny McCarthy carry more weight in an argument than the actual scientists that can prove she is wrong? How does Kim Kardashian’s opinion mean more then Neil deGrasse Tyson’s? How? How? How? Why do you idolize the dumb and condemn the truth of our times? It can’t be all escapism. It just can’t.
You believe what you see on TV and what you read on the internet. The TV “news” said something so it is a fact. The internet says something so it MUST be true, IT MUST. The internet can’t lie, that’s illegal. You can NOT just put things out there that are not factual. You just can’t. Why don’t you try to find something out for yourself and not just take the “word” of something like Faux News? A great example of this is the recent grilling of Hillary Clinton by noted dipshit Rand Paul who asked her about guns being smuggled to Turkey. Turkey? That never happened but Paul saw on Faux News that it did and proceeded to make a fool of himself in front of the entire country because he saw it on TV and thought “it HAS to be true”. That brings me to my next point; we are lazy as well. Why learn something when you can just google it from your phone? Why research something when you can have someone else do it and believe what they tell you, no matter how foolhardy that may be? 30 seconds on google and Paul could have avoided the public shaming he gave himself.
Now I am not just talking about the fun dumb shit like TV shows or movie stars being held up as a benchmark for society, there is also the much more serious issue of things like the growing militia movement, conmen and plagiarists being given a stage to fleece, the deadly spread of organized religion… and with that there comes the spread of ignorance and idiocy inherent in all faiths. “I choose to believe” takes precedence over “I know for a fact”.
I am sickened to my core that there are now, at this very moment, more people that believe in angels than believe in global warming. I am disheartened that there is a great number of people that think this planet is only a mere 2000 years old or that Obama is a muslim/was born in Kenya or that George Bush actually won Florida. The fact is that the majority of our county lives not in the real world but in a carefully constructed fantasy world that is rapidly shattering around them. You see democracy as only such when it is in your favor. You see anything that goes against your ignorant and bigoted views as being dangerous and something that must be stomped out. You see socialism instead of humanity. You see “god did it” in place of “here is how science proves this”. You see threats all around you when in reality you are the threat to those that actually live in reality rather than a meticulously constructed dream state.
You give money to snake oil salesmen like Adrian Lee and Glenn Beck in the blind assertion that they are not the borderline sociopaths they truly are. You gave money to TV preachers that claim god spoke to them. You bought that clown from the home shopping channel because you were assured it would go up in value. You bought Adrian Lee’s book because you bought his line of bullshit the same as you bought the smoothie maker you saw in that infomercial. You as a societal whole are the reason that the Glenn Beck’s and the Adrian Lee’s are able to ply their craft, you empower them to use your own stupidity and gullibility against you. If you took the time to research ANYTHING, then they would not be able to fool you with parlor tricks or fast talk. *Adrian Lee (or Adian as the crawl on his pathetic little show misspells it) is one of the many examples of the hacks that don’t see people, they see marks. Lee considers himself a “Paranormal Investigator” despite the FACT that he was never ever at any of the sites he claimed to have “investigated” (leaving out my non-belief in the paranormal, that sounds quite a bit like lying to me). He stole his book and plagiarized the entire thing from numerous sources including that of Thomas Riddell and even his own (now) ex-wife. Riddell was actually at these locations while Lee was in the UK on other matters. Lee claims in his book (using Riddell’s EXACT WORDS) that he was present and did all of this “research” himself. A conman like Dr. Lee (oh wait, he likes to call himself that despite not actually having a doctorate in ANYTHING) will use others to his own end as he did here. That is what he does, that is how a sociopath is and your love of the dumb feeds people like Lee. You people out there don’t like to see the snake oil salesmen as you are handing over your wallet. People like Adrian Lee, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh need to be seen as the conmen they are. You won’t though, you like to see them as some put upon freedom fighter that has in some way been wronged by society and that, that before all else, is where you are idolizing the stupid over the truthful. Riddell gets pushed aside for Lee despite facts that prove what Lee really is, a fraud that clings to others like a ramora to a shark. Beck charges you money to lie to you and you gleefully allow it. Limbaugh spends 3 hours a day, 5 days a week telling falsehoods and you want more.
See, unlike you, I actually believe in democracy. Unlike these “patriots” that exist solely to abuse their narrow-minded version of it I am a real American. I believe in science. I believe in truth. I believe in actual democracy and not dictatorial rule through the facade of democracy. I believe in human rights and not simply rights for those that can afford it. I am an idealist to be sure, and perhaps I am living in my own world as well when it comes to what I see this world as… either way though, I am still grounded in reality, you are not. You are ruled by fear and accusation. You suspect everyone of plotting against you and you can never see that you just might be wrong. You are a scared child hoping the monsters can’t get you with the covers pulled over your head.
I ask quite a few questions here and I don’t really have the answers, at least not in a real sense anyway. The questions I have posed here run far deeper than a snarky and frankly dismal idealist who has had life fracture every segment of his being could really hope to answer. I only hope that my bringing up these items in this manner will get you to look at them and hopefully analyze them to find the fault in not just us as a culture but as individuals too. I am not sure but I fear that the numbers of those I am talking about will greatly dwarf that of those to whom I am talking to.
*You guys know how much I despise plagiarists and Adrian is my newest and honestly easiest target since nothing I have said is refutable by him. I have him by the balls and I am making it my mission to expose him. Tunnel visioned? Absolutely. Wrong? Not in the least.
Tell me to shut the fuck up a 1201beyond@gmail.com or contact Alex Jowski to fire me at alexjowski@gmail.com
