so Americans are stupid?
yes. i'm an American. i've lived here all my life, in various parts of the country, and i will gladly tell you: Americans are fucking stupid. perhaps not much stupider than anyone else, but fucking stupid nonetheless and way too stupid to have the degree of power they have.
not all of them, certainly. but, hey, about half of us don't even bother to vote, and half of those that do were in favor of the current jackass. the other half voted for a department store mannequin with the political sensibilities of a bag of dull tacks.
for years, i couldn't watch TV without getting inundated with OJ and Monica Lewinsky, not because someone imposed it on us from above but because people watched it in large numbers. we completely ignore soccer/football/whatever but our fastest growing sport is NASCAR, which basically involves rednecks turning left. the Left Behind books sell millions, and some godawfully high percentage of people in this country believe that a book written by a bunch of desert nomads several thousand years ago is literally true in all respects, even though it contradicts itself. what a lot of Americans don't believe in is global warming, even though we're doing a lot to cause it. nor do a lot of Americans believe in evolution. most of them have trouble finding many of the countries we've gone to war with recently on a freaking map.
i'd love to say "oh, it's this wacky Bush regime that's making us do this," but in reality, Bush is in many ways a symptom of the real problem: the overwhelming, bovine stupidity of huge portions of the American public. the corruption of our government is really just an opportunistic infection.
Yeah, whatever, here are some keywords: Germany, psychosis, World War One, World War Two. I can't be arsed.
yes, there were a hell of a lot of atrocities in 20th century Europe. however, they seemed to have learned something from them. that probably has something to do with the fact that they didn't sit out the first few years of both World Wars, and that both of said wars were fought in their towns and villages and fields and such.
it galls me that so many people have accused the European public of not having the stomach to make the hard call and understand that war and sacrifice are often necessary, when the US hasn't had a major war on its own soil in one-hundred-and-thirty-eight years, during which time almost everywhere else on Earth has been bombed, or invaded, or has gone through a revolution, a coup, a general collapse of some kind. nearly every country on Earth has a better firsthand understanding of the sacrifices of war than we do, which, i suspect, is why many of them are not so cavalier about the whole thing. it's different when the bombs aren't dropping "over there." |
