Dumbing Down
Our Own Democracy

Lowering the Expectations
and
Requirements of Citizenry

While watching some Florida governmental hearings meant to investigate "Voting Irregularities" in the 2000 Presidential election, it struck me as rather odd when several witnesses made the same angry objection:  the 9th Grade reading level generally accepted as necessary to read and understand the ballots correctly, and thereby vote properly, was unfair and discriminatory because it was an impossibly high hurdle for too many voters "of color."  Their common, virtually verbatim complaint was, "I shouldn't have to be a Rocket Scientist to vote!"  What a peculiar, self denigrating, and disturbing notion: that for people of color, a 9th Grade level reading proficiency is just as impossible to achieve as is Rocket Science, that this requirement is a deliberate deficiency in the Culture itself which is bigoted against race and ethnicity, and the ultimate result is the disenfranchisement of black voting rights.               

In order to remedy this hateful injustice, American Society must be retooled downward to accommodate the most stupid and inept among us instead of them retooling themselves upward to the tasks of adequate citizenship.  We must spend billions of  dollars on voting machines that can be used by people who can't read, or spell, or even see the machines at all.  We must make certain that every person of color is welcomed into the polling place as if they were royalty, entitled to every consideration due to wonderful, yet helpless, stupid, children.  Normal folks must be forced to understand that the least among us are people too, and the nation as a whole must honor and reflect the lowest common denominator.  Anything less is criminal, just another race-based crime in America's 600 year history of social injustice heaped on a non-white victim class kept wretched by slavery, bigotry, and exclusion.  

Because the ignorant are entitled to vote, the intelligent people must adapt themselves down to the lower standard.  The entire culture must be made imbecile-proof, simply for the sake of the comfort of the imbeciles, who are a tiny, tiny minority that can't successfully vote Democratic, even when they try.

Absurd as it may seem, accusations of this sort pervade American social life:  "I'm perfectly OK just as I am, and I shouldn't have to improve myself to succeed in life.  It's only because I've been kept behind by an evil society that I'm not a Rocket Scientist.  I'm just as good as anyone else, and I deserve the rewards that anyone else would get from life, dammit.  Anyone who would impose standards on me is denying me opportunities that are given to other people who are no more deserving than me." 

With this rationale, it's possible for ignorant, unqualified people to see themselves as the equal of the achievers at the top of the pyramid.  After all, the Constitution says that we're all equal, so even the most uneducated, illiterate buffoon must be accommodated in his lowest terms as if he's an aristocrat.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with him and he should be plugged into a high paying corporate job because he's just as good as the people who have those jobs now.

The argument that every person is the equal of every other person, or that any opinion (no matter how incorrect or uninformed) is the equal of any other opinion, is (of course) Sociological Relativism.  But it's Relativism with a downward twist:  "America must be brought down to my level, and not the other way around.  To insist that I improve myself  is bigotry because it assumes that I'm not good enough already, or that what I believe isn't accurate or true.  It means that I'm a second class citizen, denied the same respect, rights, and privileges as those who can read and write, those who can vote without making a mess of it."                           

This is the demand that America be 'dumbed down' to the level of the most stupid among us.  People who hold deeply religious beliefs  must be portrayed as bigots for the sake of those with no morals or with the repugnant morals of Satanism and Santeria (and Liberalism).  Math and Science must be portrayed as merely the opinions of an illegitimate white male social paradigm, to be replaced by Feminist Math and Afro-Centric Science, just to accommodate those people who can't / won't / don't learn well enough to get good grades.  Facts become opinions and opinions become facts.  Just dumb down the subject matter and expectations to where the stupid and inept can succeed.  After all, "I shouldn't have to improve myself, I shouldn't have to work hard to succeed at anything.  America must be retooled downward so that I am proud of myself at every moment of my life."

And isn't that the whole point of the complaint?  That the stupid must not be made to feel stupid about their own stupidity?  That the role of Government is to adjust our entire society, and its definition of an educated Citizenry, down to the level of the everyday lazy, illiterate non-achievers?  Is the "self esteem" of the ignorant so important that in can be traded to the stupid in place of  "achievement?"  

Of course it is.  People don't like to feel badly about themselves, even criminals don't think of themselves as bad people.  People don't like to hear that they're not smart enough read or write or vote correctly.  They'd rather think that America is bad, that the Republicans conspired to humiliate them, using trickery and Rocket Science to deprive them of their right to vote.  

Well, it wasn't racism; it wasn't intimidation; it wasn't a vast evil Right Wing Conspiracy; it wasn't faulty ballots or inefficient voting machines; it was their own God damned debilitating STUPIDITY, plain and simple.                             

And if we spend billions to rebuild and idiot-proof our voting procedures instead of insuring that our voters actually can read at a 9th Grade Level, then the idiots will have won.  Reading will disappear, and so will Rocket Science.