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So then, the Lovenstein Institute’s findings include that Bill Clinton was the most intelligent president, and George W Bush the least – George W being only half as intelligent as Bill. Also the average IQs of the Democratic presidents were considerably higher than those of their Republican counterparts.

While George W may not be bright, he was bright enough to convince Americans to vote him in as president not just once, but twice. What, then, does this say about Americans? Would any other people anywhere voluntarily cast their votes for someone as obviously mentally and educationally challenged as George W Bush?

And what about the fact of the average IQ (156) of Democratic presidents being considerably higher than that (115.5) of Republican presidents? Could it be that the more intelligent one is, and the more educated, the more likely one will be a liberal, and therefore a Democrat, given that liberals tend to see all sides of an issue – a reflection of the thoughtfulness arising out of greater intelligence and education? If the answer is “yes”, it would explain why Democratic presidents are generally more intelligent and better educated than their Republican brothers.

The generations of Americans born after the Second World War have been described as the best educated ever, presumably based on the amount of taxpayer money poured into education, so that over the last sixty years, schools, universities, and teachers, have proliferated like locusts in a vast savanna of rotting animal carcasses. Yet it is this post WW2 generation, the best educated ever, the “baby boomers”, and their offspring of generation “X”ers and “Y”ers, who voted in not just once, but twice, George W Bush, shown by the Lovenstein Institute to be the least intelligent president in the last sixty years, and arguably the most ignorant, as well as the least intelligent president since George Washington.

But are post WW2 Americans the best educated ever, in fact? For what do we mean by “best educated”,or “educated” or “education”? It used to be that an educated person was looked upon as someone steeped in literature, the arts, philosophy, and history, with sometimes some science and mathematics added on – in short, a person grounded in the Humanities. But since public education is now orientated towards getting a good job, education in the Humanities has steadily made way for training in business and technology. But our perceptions of universities haven’t changed, so that we look at someone with a B.Com, MBA, or a degree in computer science as “educated” rather than as “trained”.

So perhaps the post WW2 generations could better be described as the best trained ever, rather than as the best educated. In fact we might look at the post WW2 generations as the least “educated” in the classical sense, given the TV fare they like to watch, like American Idol, that tens of millions of them believe every word in the Bible and all its superstitions to be literally true, and that they saw nothing wrong in entrusting the governance of the US of A to the illiterate and troglodytic George W Bush – a modern-day Dauphin King.

If you doubt what I say and are becoming apoplectic with rage, ask yourself if there’s any other democratic country that has at its helm, or has ever had at its helm, someone as dim as George W Bush. And ask yourself whether a nation that calls itself educated, whose denizens are supposed to know some history, and are supposed to be able to think critically – the results of being educated - could vote in as president the like of George W Bush, not only once, but twice.

George W Bush’s illiteracy, dimness, and shallowness is reflected in his limited range of vocabulary (6,500 words vs 11,000 for other presidents), so that when speaking extemporaneously he sounds like a six year old child, or at most like an immature teenager – something in stark relief to the speaking style of George W’s opponent in the 2004 election, John Kerry, whose labyrinthine Lincolnesque responses to questions reflected his thoughtfulness, a thoughtfulness too much for Kerry’s fellow Americans - reared on five-second TV sound bites – who turned to George W for welcome simplicity.

George W Bush manufactured the consent of Americans into invading Iraq because he scared them into thinking they were under imminent threat from Saddam, so that anyone dissenting was unpatriotic. But if Americans were educated, and so knew history, they would have known that scaring the people into war is a time-honored tactic used not only by previous presidents, but by rulers everywhere. And they would also have known the cardinal rule about governments, that they lie, and lie as a matter of course, so that any president - whether George W Bush or anyone else - opening his mouth to speak should be presumed to be lying unless he can prove otherwise.

And if Americans were educated and so knew history, they would know about the colonial experiences of the former European colonizers of today’s Third World, and so they would know that colonization was only possible because of the tacit consent of the colonized, and that when they, the colonized - whether they were sub-continental Indians, Africans, Middle-Easterners, or South-East Asians – withdrew their tacit consent to being colonized, the Europeans had no choice but to leave and to dismantle their empires because the climate of opinion around the world regarding colonial empires ruled by white men had changed. So if Americans were educated, and so knew history, they would have recognized their country’s occupation of Iraq as simply another military occupation of a Third World country by white men, and would know it would end in disaster because the time for such colonial adventures by white men expired more than fifty years ago.

So Americans, not knowing history, failed to see that George W was lying, just like every other president or any other ruler, and failed to see the unfolding debacle in Iraq as entirely predictable, no matter how many American soldiers were sent.

Governments, particularly the American, may have a vested interest in ensuring not much history is taught in schools for obvious reasons. But today, with the internet and google.com and all, there’s no reason any of us with access to a computer – and that’s nearly everyone – should remain ignorant about anything. So you’d think we’d be at the point of history where we will be so well informed about what happened in the past, we’ll be impervious to the propagandizing effect of the all the distortions, prevarications and lies spewing forth from the mouths of presidents, prime ministers, other government officials, corporations, religious fundamentalists and their like.

But this won’t happen, for most of us will choose to remain willfully ignorant, and will continue to believe the official lies, because it’s more comfortable. We have, in fact, always chosen to remain ignorant, since there have always been public libraries where anyone could become well informed about anything for free, but relatively few chose to, for reading widely and learning lots of history is one of the most subversive things we can do, and to be subversive is, well, just not nice.

Why, then, should the internet and google.com make any difference?

So we, the sheep, will continue to baa furiously at any of our fellow sheep intrepid enough to step outside our sheep-pen and tell the truth to Power, until they, the intrepid sheep, become sufficiently frightened to scuttle back to the safety of the pen.

How sad. How tragic. How stupid.

# posted by bmovies : 4:28 PM