[Infowarrior] - America the Illiterate

[Richard Forno]

(Couldn't have said it better myself.....-rf)

America the Illiterate
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate/
Posted on Nov 10, 2008

By Chris Hedges

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a  
print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the  
intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America,  
which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief  
system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for  
information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based  
culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is  
informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown  
into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide,  
more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or  
nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into  
radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold  
high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who  
read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s  
population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are  
growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are  
supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based  
existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of  
college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty  
percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a  
book.

The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without  
the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American  
political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting  
epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans  
and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now  
masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an  
experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills.  
They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria,  
empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are  
carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle  
public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal.  
They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a  
state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They  
cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It  
is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform  
our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works  
because so much of the American electorate, including those who should  
know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful  
family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the  
attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain  
powerless.  They still cannot protect their children from  
dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory  
loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements  
and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and  
bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily  
life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank  
forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance  
papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of  
thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come  
with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand.  
Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but  
because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who  
serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash  
registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our  
brave new world.

Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be  
competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these  
qualities. Most of all they need a story, a narrative. The reality of  
the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the  
facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are  
paramount. The most essential skill in political theater and the  
consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at artifice succeed.  
Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail. In an age of  
images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional  
gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged  
and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that  
tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest  
country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical  
qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because  
of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both.

The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them  
and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives  
these lies the aura of an uncontested truth. We are repeatedly fed  
words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or  
war on terror. It feels good not to think. All we have to do is  
visualize what we want, believe in ourselves and summon those hidden  
inner resources, whether divine or national, that make the world  
conform to our desires. Reality is never an impediment to our  
advancement.

The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush  
debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon  
debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed  
these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the  
minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text.  
During the 2000 debates, George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level  
(6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In the 1992 debates,  
Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W.  
Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3).  
In the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the  
candidates spoke in language used by 10th-graders. In the debates of  
Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were respectively  
11.2 and 12.0. In short, today’s political rhetoric is designed to be  
comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade  
reading level. It is fitted to this level of comprehension because  
most Americans speak, think and are entertained at this level. This is  
why serious film and theater and other serious artistic expression, as  
well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of  
American society. Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th  
century. Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse.

In our post-literate world, because ideas are inaccessible, there is a  
need for constant stimulus. News, political debate, theater, art and  
books are judged not on the power of their ideas but on their ability  
to entertain. Cultural products that force us to examine ourselves and  
our society are condemned as elitist and impenetrable. Hannah Arendt  
warned that the marketization of culture leads to its degradation,  
that this marketization creates a new celebrity class of intellectuals  
who, although well read and informed themselves, see their role in  
society as persuading the masses that “Hamlet” can be as entertaining  
as “The Lion King” and perhaps as educational. “Culture,” she wrote,  
“is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”

“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries  
of oblivion and neglect,” Arendt wrote, “but it is still an open  
question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version  
of what they have to say.”

The change from a print-based to an image-based society has  
transformed our nation. Huge segments of our population, especially  
those who live in the embrace of the Christian right and the consumer  
culture, are completely unmoored from reality. They lack the capacity  
to search for truth and cope rationally with our mounting social and  
economic ills. They seek clarity, entertainment and order. They are  
willing to use force to impose this clarity on others, especially  
those who do not speak as they speak and think as they think. All the  
traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific  
and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless  
instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.

As we descend into a devastating economic crisis, one that Barack  
Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of millions of Americans who  
will be ruthlessly thrust aside. As their houses are foreclosed, as  
their jobs are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy and  
watch their communities collapse, they will retreat even further into  
irrational fantasy. They will be led toward glittering and self- 
destructive illusions by our modern Pied Pipers—our corporate  
advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television news celebrities,  
our self-help gurus, our entertainment industry and our political  
demagogues—who will offer increasingly absurd forms of escapism.

The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself,  
to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and  
common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to  
challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth  
from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are  
other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially  
acceptable, are dying. Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in  
campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and  
irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his  
most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that  
awaits us.