And Jesus' Eyes and Ears Bled Like the Stigmata

     We'll never know from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John if Jesus prized intelligence in others or if it meant anything to him at all. My guess is that he may have appreciated it in others but still not disparage the feeble-minded just being feeble-minded. God knows we cannot all be Albert Einstein or, if you're too feeble-minded to understand even the rudiments of his Theory of Relativity and would prefer The Coneheads to trying to understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or Schrödinger's cat, Dan Aykroyd.
     Yet I think even the famous patience of the son o' God would've been sorely tested were he to encounter today's right wingers and other enzyme-challenged phallus heads who operate just above or below the mental Mendoza Line. And God knows more of us need to speak out and drown out the stupid and willfully ignorant like this foul-mouthed young man, whoever he is, in Cambridge, Massachusetts who screamed for four minutes and ten seconds at a dumpling of a man who happens to work for conspiracy theorist and human sweat gland Alex Jones, who lost whatever last shred of credibility he ever had after his Chernobyl Reactor 4-class meltdown on Piers Morgan's show.
     It's been a constant whine of the intelligent and talented that genius is rarely appreciated within its own lifetime. Yet since the days of Reagan and perhaps before that, we've seen a disturbing trend in which not only has intelligence, talent and erudition been thoroughly discredited and made a liability but sheer, impenetrable stupidity and willful ignorance is actually rewarded. And we are so complacent and apathetic as a nation that such stupidity and ignorance is waved away and made to look like assets with the aid of a few paid spin doctors on the payroll of one campaign or another because we ourselves are too fucking stupid and ignorant to be able to judge for ourselves what qualifies as stupid and ignorant.
     And this is precisely the reason why short bus cheerleaders like Sarah Palin and pill-popping child molesting bigots like Rush Limbaugh are not only hailed as cultural icons, they make damned good money fluffing up the fears of other mouthbreathers like comely girls stroking wilting penises on a porno movie set. Otherwise, how are we to account why it finally took the American public over four years to realize they'd been bamboozled by a JPL wind tunnel-headed moron such as Sarah Palin, who'd quit halfway through her first and only term as a state Governor when the scandals grew too numerous for even her to sneer away?
     This is what led to the fall of the ancient Romans: A complacency that had allowed them to believe in not only the superiority of their outlook but their own invulnerability. And because they couldn't even fortify their own immediate borders to the north, they were sacked by a horde of barbarians who a few hundred years before wouldn't have stood a chance against the Roman army.
     I've been saying for years now that we're making the movie Idiocracy look like a prescient documentary and have, as always, been ignored. But while you may think it expedient to ignore my hardly original or unfounded bemoanings of the lowering of the intellectual bar in our nation, the evidence is nevertheless all around us. And it will not go away just because you choose to ignore me and others like me.
      I shouldn't need to provide what few people who still read this forum with links proving how far we've fallen behind the rest of the world in terms of science, mathematics, engineering, medicine and so forth. But there's also an even deeper problem and that's our inexhaustible capacity for making the phrase "common sense" more and more of an oxymoron and less and less of a tautology.
     Because if more of us had the common sense that had been endowed to our ancestors and seemingly an increasingly generous amount given to generations before, then people such as Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell wouldn't be allowed to set one toe in the political arena seeking the highest offices in the land. We wouldn't be catapulting literary agents, publishers and TV producers at them and trying to bloat their ill-deserved 15 minutes of fame into actual careers in which the more they fail, the more things they get wrong and the more they alienate those who control their fortunes the more they are rewarded. Some of them, like Don Imus, get their jobs back. Others, such as Glenn Beck, like the distended side of a koosh ball, pop up somewhere else where all it takes is an idiotic conspiracy theory regarding the Boston Marathon bombing to put one back on top and whipping up atavistic fear in the reptilian parts of our brains simply in the cynical interests of ratings.
     People like Beck, Palin, O'Donnell, Pam Gellar and the like, those who comfortably huddle just on the bubble of that mental Mendoza line, are the price we all pay for moral and intellectual laziness and complacency. Back in the 60's, airheads like Palin or Victoria Jackson or Christine O'Donnell or Alan West or Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain wouldn't have even been invited on the set of Laugh In as was Nixon. We'd be incapable of believing these people could be so stupid and ignorant because they'd be a parody of a parody.
     And I'm sure that more than a few of us have wondered of this scenario: 31st century archeologists are sifting through the ruins of earth after the inevitable yet avoidable apocalypse and sift through the detritus of our 21st century garbage. They will see empty cans of energy drinks, used condoms and, interspersed with those, porno DVDs, books by right wingers and no one else, Bush campaign buttons and TV Guides with every reality TV show circled. And these archeologists will wonder how we ever got to the moon or even got out of the Stone Age when we were so poorly engineered and prepared for planetary stewardship.
     Then they may see on a wall or two a crucifix of an emaciated man and may perhaps learn of his life and the lessons he'd tried to impart. And they may wonder why, for all his power to heal, he couldn't do a fucking thing about stupidity.