Dick Cheney was in Iraq again recently, telling the press corps that followed him there that the US had to invade Iraq to fight the Al Qaeda terrorists who were responsible for 9/11.
Just weeks before he stood in front of the troops and media there, he had received the exhaustive Pentagon sponsored review of about 600,000 documents that found absolutely no correlation between Iraq and anything having to do with 9/11. The story here though is not that Dick Cheney is a sociopathic liar – That’s an old story, no new surprises there.
To me the story is that this decrepit, creepy old man understands something very special about the new American culture.
Susan Jacoby wrote a book titled The Age of American Unreason. In that book, she analyzes why Americans will endlessly be victims to creepy little manipulators like Cheney or Karl Rove.
Jacoby says Americans are in very serious intellectual trouble – we are living in an era of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, and generally a period of low expectations. That is why we elect a lightweight like George Bush twice and believe in him as a leader.
Jacoby points out that in 1982, 82% of college graduates actually read novels just for the fun of it. Today that number is somewhere around 60%. In fact, more than 40% of Americans under the age of 44 never read a single book in the course of an entire year. So needless to say, shaping public opinions becomes overwhelmingly easy for Cheney’s and Bush’s and Karl Rove’s and Rupert Murdoch.
Its almost like they are handling a silly putty right out of the package.
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