Fine words, Mr. Obama, fine intentions, Mrs Clinton, but where will you find the good administrators?

The Bush administration has been famously populated either by incompetent people who, as the British rather coarsely say, "couldn’t manage a piss-up in a brewery".  But this is not just a problem for one political party, it is a general problem for the U.S and for its Western allies.   The fear is that our problems are not just down to bad deciding by The Decider but a more sinister trend:  the country is so dumbed down that educated and literate good people (folks!) are becoming fewer, if not disappearing.  And the population doesn’t care:

–    In 1982 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; in 1992 the figure was 67%, and over 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book in a year. The number of 17 year olds who read nothing outside school doubled between 1984 and 2004, and babies between 8 and 16 months have been shown to recognize an average of 6 to 8 fewer words for every hour spent watching videos. (Univ of Washington 2007)
  
–    One in five adults think the sun revolves round the Earth (Nat. Science Foundation)

–    Nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 don’t think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is made.

–    The astonishing lack of general knowledge, even among well educated people with PhDs,  is one of the things that struck me personally when I came years ago to the Unites States. 

–    The video culture has meant that Presidential candidates in 1988 had only 9.8 seconds nowadays to get a point across, compared with 42.3 seconds in 1968 .  This has probably got worse under the anti-intellectual government of the last seven years and with the increasing grip on the media by a small group of right-wingers.
 
–    The steady drip-drip of anti-government propaganda and pressure to reduce taxes has discouraged good candidates from top universities from joining government service.

–    This is a pincer movement, not just a phenomenon of the know-nothing right wing –  the academics have written Shakespeare and the greats of English literature out of curricula and have substituted Latino, homosexual and African-American Studies and have given tenure to the professors involved.   Everyone has to have an A Grade!  There is a pervasive anti-intellectualism that  goes unremarked but is like an acid, eating away at the roots of Western culture.

And most Americans, and most Brits DON’T CARE!

One could go on to the faith items: “intelligent design”, the age of the earth, the creation of Mankind, but I won’t.  It’s too depressing!  Epicurus might find better expletives than mine to attack these trends.  People  whitter on about the "Greatness" of the country while determinedly undermining it. 
   
(Sources:  various)