The New Illiteracy

Long-lost contributor Titus Levi, who has left our shores to teach in China, directed my attention today to a website called truthout (www.truthout.org). It is a non-profit that lives on donations. You need to check it out, and donate if you wish.

Today I read a thick, heady piece by Henry A. Giroux called "The Spectacle of Illiteracy and the Crisis of Democracy." He argues that "as a result of this widespread illiteracy that has come to dominate American culture we have moved from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting, and in doing so have restaged politics and power in both unproductive and anti-democratic ways."

He doesn't characterize illiteracy as the inability to read, but it's more of a celebration of ignorance and anti-intellectualism.

In this age, where an intelligent, educated, and well-spoken black man becomes the President of the United States, millions of citizens dismiss his accomplishments as reasons to hate him. These same millions celebrate the ascendancy of an incurious and culturally vacant housewife who graduated college with a degree in something akin to advanced basket-weaving, who betrayed professional and political relationships to climb the ladder to the national stage. And then they blame everyone else except her for her utter failure to turn her obvious gifts into a seat next to the leader of the free world.

It is an age where entertainers on radio and television, who pay more attention to the ad buys keeping their shows on the air than the opinions of their audiences, can sway that audience into believing that the president must be made to fail and that the president's government is full of communists (and is somehow also hurtling us towards Nazi-style fascism!).

It is an age where millions of people blame the government (from public schools to public healthcare) for everything bad that is happening in the world, yet they are absolutely blind to the fact that so much of their disposable incomes have been coaxed out of their wallets by corporations who pelt them with message after message that their lives would be so much better if only they'd buy their products.

I can understand that myopia: after all, corporations employ us, right? It's our choice to buy or not to buy, right? And the government only mucks things up, right? Well, in post-Bush/Cheney America, where corporations are facing a reckoning with the American public who have been royally fleeced, it turns out that government is the only thing standing in the way of a global economic depression. FDR's dramatic governmental interventions ushered in eras of employment, which ended our only depression. The stock market crash of 1929 and the global financial crisis of 2007 have significant parallels, in that the government had to step in and prop up companies that had become so huge that their failures would have brought us all down with them. Conservatives argued against the nationalization of these companies, but really, hadn't those businesses "corporatized" us? And with what result, huh? A great big pile of bailout money that is generating an economic recovery, but potentially without the job growth that such a recovery should bring.

But of course, this illiteracy dismisses all of that, utterly. We are the greatest celebrants of mediocrity in the world, salving ourselves with denial so that we never have to face reality. And any attempt to celebrate excellence is immediately attacked as "elitism."

Uh, yeah right. To them I just say, Eff You.