The Year of Living Stupidly

[Guest guest]

December 14 - 20, 2005

 

Mossback: The Year of Living Stupidly

 

It's time to tell ourselves we're doing a heckuva job.

 

by Knute Berger

 

2005 is the year of the idiot, the moron, the incompetent, of the man in over

his head. It is a reverse renaissance—when bad ideas are in ascendance.

 

Once, humanity dreamed of the great instauration—a rebirth of ancient wisdom

that would compel us into a New Age, a Golden Age.

 

Now, we dream of a return to the less-bad scenario, we pray for the avoidance of

future catastrophes—all the while behaving in ways that make them more likely.

We claim homeland security is a priority, then we allow the Federal Emergency

Management Agency to be dismantled under the hapless stewardship of Mike

" Heckuva Job " Brown. We say Social Security is sacrosanct, then allow the

government to pursue spending that virtually guarantees future gutting. We ships

jobs to Bangladesh so that we can have bargains at Wal-Mart.

 

The American dream is reduced to hoping that China will treat us nicely when we

become her bitch as she forecloses on the mountain of debt we owe to keep our

credit-binge society floating.

 

Religious extremists of various stripes magnify our dumb self-destructiveness.

These folks pray for worse times to come. They embrace the negative as part of a

spiritual cleansing, be it through a global jihad driven by suicide bombers or

the welcoming of global warming as harbinger of a biblically predicted

apocalypse. Never mind that you don't share their world view.

 

While these folks exist on the fringes of the bell curve of faith and reason,

they are influential beyond their number. Much of our time and resources are

consumed combating their ignorance. And it isn't just in fighting Islamic

terrorism. The one big debate in education this year has been whether

intelligent design ought to be taught as a scientific theory in public schools.

To do so is to make a mockery of all those reforms designed to hold our schools

and students to objective standards. If religious ideas can be taught as

science, then the only standards we have are the kind the Taliban would

sanction.

 

Are these the worst of times? Well, we're not in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as

documented in Seattle author Timothy Egan's grand new book, The Worst Hard Time,

which I review on p. 96. However, our civilization—led by America—might well

be in the process of making a figurative dust bowl on a global scale, one that

is environmental but also political, cultural, and spiritual.

 

The American fish is rotting from the head down. Seattle-based History News

Network took an informal poll of some 400 historians, and 80 percent of them

dubbed George W. Bush's presidency a failure thus far. They ranked him among the

worst presidents: Richard Nixon, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Ulysses S.

Grant, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan.

 

Being ranked with Buchanan is a particularly ignominious prize. Here was a man

who, when faced with a national crisis, made every wrong step. He surrounded

himself with cronies and yes-men and looked after the rich. He clung to strict

constitutional constructionism that protected the slave-holding class, though

only when it suited him. He rattled the saber of manifest destiny with an

unprecedented jingoistic gusto: He sent the U.S. Navy to attack Paraguay, which

is landlocked. Instead of preserving the Union, he tore it apart. Sound like any

president you know?

 

We know incompetence closer to home, too. This was the year that we were offered

an $11 billion monorail project—potentially the worst boondoggle in the city's

history. A project that should have died in the cradle was allowed to waste $100

million of the people's hard-earned cash, for no benefit but the reminder that

building castles—or monorails—in the air doesn't make sound public policy if

you don't have the foundations to support them, like financing and leadership.

To Seattle's credit, the city came to its senses and killed the project—not

the first time a civic mercy killing has been performed. But it is no great

tribute that the best public deed of the year was to prevent a huge

self-inflicted disaster from becoming an even bigger one. I thought of that as I

paid my $246.75 motor vehicle excise tax to help fill the financial hole left by

the Seattle Monorail Project.

 

Another dubious achievement was our ability to hold an election in King County

that stayed out of the courts. While Ron Sims and his staff get credit for

getting us through November more or less intact, they still have not solved the

underlying personnel, cultural, and management problems with the elections

department that exploded in 2004. Now that they've got some breathing room, they

need to fix any remaining systemic problems.

 

But one thing they can do little about is to fix the incompetence of the

electorate itself, and I'm not talking about the choices we make at the ballot

box. The Seattle Times reported this week that 45,000 ballots in King County,

and more than 100,000 statewide, had to be redone by hand so they could be read

by tabulating machines. The problem is that a significant number of

voters—about 8 percent—don't know how to fill in a simple ballot. They

can't, don't, or won't read the simple instructions. In other words, there are

tens of thousands of people in this state who cannot take a pen and color in a

tiny oval.

 

Does that thought help you sleep better? Me neither.

 

kberger

 

Copyright © 1997-2004, Seattle Weekly and Village Voice Media