Book on my mind

Today, I finished Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason after nearly a year of reading it off and on. The book, which deals with the rise of anti-intellectualism in the United States and picks up where Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life left off, wasn't too dense a read. I just found the topic of how, to borrow a phrase, the United States is amusing itself to death a wee bit depressing, and I don't need anything else to make me feel hopeless. But it really is a terrific book that will change your perspective on the world and people around you. One particular passage encapsulated and exemplified exactly what she was talking about:

What might help alert the public to the deeper significance of our nation's intellectual shortcomings? Real political leadership, comparable to Franklin Roosevelt's effort to educate Americans in the late 1930s about their stake in the future of Europe and the threat posed by Nazism, could take advantage of the public anger about the war in Iraq to make this a truly teachable moment instead of a simple repudiation of a failed policy. But it would take awesome courage for a candidate to say to voters: "The problem isn't just that you were lied to. The real problem is that we, as a people, have become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions. The problem is that two-thirds of us can't find Iraq on a map, and many members of Congress don't know a Shiite from a Sunni. The problem is that the public doesn't know enough or care enough about culture to be outraged when a United States secretary of defense, informed that some of the oldest artifacts of Western civilization are being looted from a Baghdad museum on our watch, says dismissively, 'Stuff happens.' The problem is that most of us don't bother to read newspapers or even watch the news on television. Our own ignorance is our worst enemy." [bolding mine] It is so much easier, so much safer politically, to simply say, "You were the victims of a lie," than to suggest that both voters and their elected representatives, in both parties, must shoulder much of the blame for their willingness to be deceived.