Must remember to pick up Esquire
February 4th, 2006I Almost Want to Shout “AMEN”: “From Pharyngula comes this stirring and delicious article that makes this confirmed cynic want to shout with glee. Someone gets it! There are still functioning brains out there! Idiot America“
Apparently from an Esquire article behind a pay-wall. I might have to get the issue to read the rest:
It begins with a description of a tour of Ken Ham’s new creation science museum in Kentucky, with its dinosaurs wearing saddles and its bland Adam, which we learn is naked but sculpted without a penis, and the train of well-fed Middle American boobs lining up with great earnestness to parade through the patently bogus exhibits.
What is Idiot America?
The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good.
Sounds very cool. There’s been a sort of ongoing attack against science, knowledge, and intelligence in this country for too long. Not that I think this is the end of it, but it’s nice to see that other people recognize it as well.
