The poverty of our educational system
Having grown up in an NJ suburb of Manhattan (Tony Soprano’s home town in the series), I’ve met my share of macho wannabe mobsters like the punk who presently defiles the Oval Office (when he is not out consuming much Secret Service protection on the golf links). Like The Donald, they tend to demonstrate something that has been discussed a lot in recent years; the Dunning-kruger effect. Based on the research of the eponymous academics, their studies indicate that the less one knows about any given subject, the more likely you are to believe in your superior knowledge or expertise in that field.
Trump, who is barely literate and struggles to keep up with a Teleprompter when he is forced to use one, is a prime illustration of this effect; claiming that he knows more about military affairs than the admirals and generals who have spent their lives studying such things, or that his gut instinct is a better guide for leading the nation through this tragic pandemic than someone like Dr. Fauci, who has spent decades studying viruses.
It is a terrible indictment of our educational system, that across this great land, so many people have been hoodwinked into voting for such this lying buffoon, an obvious malignant narcissist, for the highest post in the land.
In a country where working people, statistically, haven’t had a raise in 40 years, the political system, whichever party is in power, has for decades showered riches on those lucky few at the very top of the wealth distribution curve. With more tax write offs, lower taxes, ways to shelter money to help ensure that their sons and daughters get to attend the most prestigious universities, the political system has helped the oligarchic families maintain their position at the top, regardless of innate ability or work ethic.
Trump is a sterling example of this phenomenon; having paid someone a lot smarter than him to take his SATS (according to his sister, who even named the surrogate), I would bet you that he never wrote a single paper himself during his whole college career. How could he when his daily Twitter feed documents his tenuous grasp of English language and grammar.
The poverty of our educational system is both the cause of so much economic misery for so many Americans, as well as the reason that so many of them turn, in desperation, to this prevaricating Pied Piper, who is utterly unconstrained by any impulse to tell people the truth or to tell any kind of consistent story from one audience to another; he’s happy to promise an audience one day that he will do what he has no intention of actually doing, and his next audience exactly the opposite, if that’s what he thinks they want to hear.
Some are saying that he has ushered in a post-truth era; that people want so much to believe that someone is coming to their rescue that facts don’t matter. It is pointless to argue facts with someone who is focused instead on their blind belief in something.
While we can be grateful for having been saved from the horrifying prospect of another four years of Trump’s venal misrule, we have all got to think long and hard about what it means for our country to have about 70 million people who have lived, like the rest of us, through the mass death brought on by Orange man’s utter incompetence and lack of basic human concern for his fellow man, or the ongoing collapse of so many of their fellow citizen’s economic existence, and still vote for him. At this point, without massive intervention many millions of American families will be turned out into the cold right around Christmas after the emergency aid to them runs out. This economic collapse will affect us all. What are Trump supporters thinking? They can’t all be billionaires, the only people who really have any reason to applaud Trump’s rule.
As a child of parents who saw The Depression, fiscal conservatism is practically in my DNA; the thought of printing up and giving away massive amounts of money is a hard sell for me, but if you have read about the way-underreported story of what is referred to as, ‘quantitative easing’, you know that ever since the ‘08 economic crash our country has been handing out trillions of dollars to bankers and Wall Street, quietly buying up the garbage investments that they created and foisted on the public as AAA rated. It almost collapsed the entire US economy, yet none of the malefactors who knowingly pulled off this enormous scam have done a single night in jail. Quite the contrary; many of them enjoyed huge bonuses for their wonderful work, subsidized by you and me!
Today I heard about the compromise where the Democrats are going to have to settle for half or less of the loaf in
order to pass something that will keep some of the many millions of out- ofwork Americans from becoming homeless in another month or two. Of course the Republicans were never worried about deficit spending when the recipient of their largess were the richest of the rich and the biggest corporations.
Please, if you can, send donations to Georgia to win those two runoff Senate seats, or Biden will be basically unable to do much if any good once he wrests the reins out of the soft, pudgy little hands of the Dear Leader.