Fear of a Strange Red Planet

I have something to say to the red state zealots, to the right wing campaign volunteers, to the tea party protesters, to the Joe-the-Plumbers, and to the Populist movement who has turned a popular fear of government and the educated and moneyed classes into a political movement so sweeping and vast that the recent Presidential election, as a referendum on one of the horrific and tragically incompetent administrations in the history of American government, was actually a close call: I’m scared. I’m scared of you. I’m scared of your pundits. I’m scared that you’ve leveraged the technology around us to turn the Information Age into the Mis-information Age. I’m scared that we are on the brink of the ultimate Populist Revolt, the culmination of the rising tide of discontent against education, freedom and equality; and an intellectual apocalypse: the rise of the stupid.

The stupid have never had more power and influence that they do today. We’ve all seen the journalistic abomination that is Fox News, which has done for slanted and mindlessly partisan news coverage what Paris Hilton did for entitled celebutantes with loose morals: each of them now far removed from the sideshows, margins and shadows and suddenly paraded in front of us as the main act. With its hyper-stylized presentation and rapid fire pacing, Fox feeds the masses in the way they want to be fed, and allows them to ignore the substance of what they’re consuming. Much like Ray Kroc once opined upon reflection of building one of the greatest commercial empires of all times, Fox isn’t in the news business, they’re in show business. And the lesson that much of our country has failed to learn about food, they’ve also failed to learn about information: just because you like eating a Big Mac, doesn’t mean you should, and definitely doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

Glenn Beck is one of the most alarmingly ignorant and disturbing political personalities since David Duke. I’d like to say that it’s his manic mood swings that disturb me most about him. I’d like to say it’s the transparently nonsensical “logic” he uses to build and confirm his conspiracy theories and then passes off as “common sense” reasoning. I’d like to say it’s his clearly histrionic personality disorder (if you don’t know, please look it up). But it’s none of these things. What disturbs me most about Glenn Beck is that he’s popular. He generates ratings like Monday Night Football and Miley Cyrus, and people aren’t tuning in to see the train wreck. No, people are watching to learn; to have their own ethnocentric fears confirmed, and to join the angry hateful mob which looks at black man in the White House as a socio-political apocalypse. Glenn Beck is the face of a nation, and that scares me far more than anything that comes out Washington D.C. ever could. A parade of fools could scarcely pick a more appropriate grand marshall.

But compared to the most inciting modern rhetoric, usually passed around via forwarded e-mails and social networking updates, Fox News (Beck included) deserves a Pulitzer. Because when the stupid turns too ugly to be mainstream - it must be passed around virally. In the past year, I have either been sent the following:

• At the end of an e-mail incorrectly recounting some of the President’s actions to date in office, with special attention to his approval of assistance to Palestinan refugees and diplomatic approach to Middle East foreign relations:
  
  “WE are losing this country at a rapid pace.
 Now we know why he got so much campaign money from the middle east!”
  

• The punchline of a mortifying “joke” about three strangers in an airport:
  
  Finally, the American Indian clears his throat and softly he speaks, "At onetime here, my people were many, but sadly, now we are few." The Muslim student raises an eyebrow and leans Forward, "Once my people were few," he sneers, "and now we are many. Why do you suppose that is?"
  
  The Montana cowboy shifts his toothpick to one side of his mouth and from the darkness beneath his Stetson says in a drawl, "That's 'cause we ain't played Cowboys and Muslims yet, but I do believe it's a-comin."
  

• And a photo that pasted the President’s head on the photo of a scantily-clad witch doctor, complete with a photoshopped bone through his nose and references to Soviet socialism that I will not dignify by reproducing it here.

The worst thing about all of these things is that they came to me from my family.

To call these kinds of things “disgusting” is to vastly understate the matter. This type of thinly veiled racism is the sort of thing that embarrasses me, even as someone who served for ten years in defense of my country, to be an American, if this is really who we are. We have unprecedented access to information, including primary sources: black-letter law, court decisions, and legislative documents. And yet, we are more prone to let our news be spoon-fed to us by increasingly less intelligent and increasingly more hateful commentators than ever before.

This isn’t a battle of ideologies, because those battles are fought on intellectual grounds. This is a battle of emotion and fear versus intellect. This is an unwinnable battle of what “real America” is all about. The red state faithful will tell you that “real America” is white people living in suburban communities where American flags fly in front lawns, kids walk to school and play in the streets safely, and all you really need to know you can learn from your parents or at church. In this “real America” you need to be able to carry a gun, because marauders, communist sympathizers and foreign combatants masquerading as immigrants are amassing on the horizon. In this “real America” knowledge and education are “brainwashing” and if you can’t figure it out with “plain ol’ horse sense”, it ain’t worth a’knowin’. They’ve convinced a frightening majority of the people in this country that being stupid goes hand-in-hand with apple pie and baseball; and that being “simple” is being “genuine”. And that’s scary; like zombie movie scary.

As a matter of fact, it’s starting to feel a lot like a zombie movie, lately; where everyone save a few rugged survivors has been turned into mindless, shuffling consumers of brains - out to turn every remaining human into another drooling and moaning member of the infected masses. Because, like a super-virus, stupid is also infectious, contagious and dangerous. Ignorance offers comfort and offers up untenable and fantastic platitudes to conquer fear. Dumb is cheap and easy, and what could be more attractive in these difficult times? And how much do the pictures from PeopleOfWalMart.com need to look like cut shots from Zombieland or 28 Days Later before we do something about it?

It appears as though the Red Scare is back for a third go-round, and it looks a lot like the first one did back in 1917. Once again there is mounting fear and anxiety that a revolution that will destroy property, Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life is imminent. And once again the media has exacerbated those political fears into widespread xenophobia. But this time, it’s the “red” that purports to be the good guys, the warriors against socialism and the protectors of the American ideal. It seems that black is the new red, and red is the new, well, white? At least they’re still fighting with good ol‘ fashioned hate and fear-mongering. We clearly didn’t learn our lesson the first two times, and as the old saying goes: we’re doomed to repeat it until we do.

As in both previous Red Scares and zombie moves, the faces of these foot soldiers for idiocy and imbecility are the faces of our friends, neighbors and even families, and it makes the terror all the more real. Because we used to know these people and now we hardly recognize them. But the enemy of this new Red Scare is not the equally fallible “Blue”, the DNC, or MSNBC. Because a scant few years ago, they were scary in their own right. No, the only real weapon against the mindless is the mindful, the only way to defeat ignorance is with knowledge, and so that’s how I choose to fight: with my facts, my knowledge and my keyboard. But unfortunately, for zombies, well, you’ve still got to blow their heads off.