**********************************************************
BILL HALL; CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Published: 09/04/10
If I may differ with some of my fellow hysterics in the press, I’m not amazed at the ignorance of a minority of Americans. I have had no illusions on that score since I was in high school and read that 15 percent of Americans couldn’t name the vice president of the United States. (It was some guy named Nixon).
So why all the melodramatic hissy fits among the talking heads on television and the typing heads in newspapers that 18 percent of Americans irrationally think President Obama is a Muslim? That’s a normal level of lunacy during any administration.
And people are not always wrong to maintain their ignorance of American vice presidents. I have seen many of those same vice presidents and several of them were utterly forgettable.
After all, vice presidential nominees aren’t necessarily chosen for their brains. They are chosen for their popularity with certain narrow segments of the electorate. That’s especially true among those voters who say approvingly, “He’s just like me.” Or “She is just like us.”
That’s not my taste. I shop for presidents and vice presidents who are smarter than I am. Similarly, I don’t want a doctor just like me, God forbid. I want a doctor who is a lot smarter than I am. Even a doctor with an illness looks for a smarter doctor.
And then there is the matter of whether it is truly sinful to be a bit ill-informed about who is vice president and about whether the president of the moment is a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew or a closeted atheist who fibs and pretends to be caught up in one of those beliefs.
For that matter, most voters believe several silly things about how wonderful or terrible given candidates are. So who are we to laugh at those who think Obama is Muslim? We should be grateful that the number of people among us who have erroneous fantasies is only 15 or 20 percent. One out of five isn’t so many. Not everybody can be a genius. And this year’s batch of slow voters isn’t the first in history. They’ve been around for generations, and we have survived.
These are the kinds of people who go to Vegas and play against house odds, expecting to come out ahead.
These are the kinds of people who let twisted mortgage bankers talk them into believing they can buy a quarter-million-dollar house with a $30,000 income.
These are people like me who spend hundreds of dollars on fishing and hunting gear and tell themselves they do it for the cheap meat.
They are people who send money for diet plans that promise they will lose 10 pounds a week without going hungry. Similarly, they send money to people who promise they can become fluent in a foreign language in a few weeks without any sweat or memorization.
These are the well-intentioned but nave worriers who send each other terrified e-mails revealing that the father of Barack Obama was born in Kenya, the father of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was born in Mexico and Sen. John McCain was born in Panama. (Egad! The foreign spawn are everywhere in our political system.)
I read one day as a child that one out of every seven people in this country is mentally ill. It seemed preposterous at the time. I used to wonder where all those mentally ill people were.
Today, I am beginning to wonder where the sane ones are.
**********************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment