A recent commentary deserves inclusion here:

"Greetings from Idiot America

by Charles Pierce
Nov 01 '05
Esquire Magazine, by way of index.cgi?board=theo&action=print&thread=1130126466>

...

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not
so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that
Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years
ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot
America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more
cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the
breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It
also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we
should trust the least are the people who best know what they're
talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a
preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert,
then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where
everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a
moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or
kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut
by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on
medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is
common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and
ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.

It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap
huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an
artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine.
It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious,
and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate
something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is
too lazy to do it.

After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence.
Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular
and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its
science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war,
Idiot America is not a country of faith; it's a faith-based country,
fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is
best fashioned.

...

How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper
account of the "intelligent design" movement contained this
remarkable sentence: "They have mounted a politically savvy challenge
to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe
academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders
firmly on the defensive."

A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently
ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry
would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on
gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket.
It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be
able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter
how many votes your candidate got, he's not going to turn lead into
gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in
it is where it appeared.

On the front page.

Of The New York Times."

---

Yeah...media-whirl makes idiots of us all, no matter which end of the counter we sit at.


A