The “1 in 5″ Club
OK, so headlining the news recently was the new poll that concluded “1 in 5 Americans think Obama is a Muslim!”
I’m not sure why this is particularly newsworthy. 1 in 5 Americans also happen to fall into the lowest quintile of intelligence quotient (math-deniers will just have to trust me on that.)
Here are a few more things that “1 in 5″ Americans believe with all their blessed little hearts:
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- The moon landing in 1969 was all a big government hoax.
- The sun revolves around the earth.
- Ghosts are real.
- Global warming is not real.
- Dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time.
- Evolution? - totally debunked, discredited.
- They know someone who has been abducted by aliens.
- Christianity came before Judaism.
- America won its independence from a country other than Great Britain (many answer “China.”)
- George W. Bush was an excellent president.
- They found the WMD in Iraq.
- The bank bailouts were done in the early days of the Obama administration, not the late days of the Bush administration.
- Sarah Palin is qualified to be president of the United States.
- They identify themselves as Republicans.
In my opinion the greatest threat to our society in the 21st century is the way so many have turned away from reason and replaced it with rote ideology supported by little else but blind faith. Al Gore wrote about it in “The Assault on Reason.” Shortly after the 2004 election a senior Bush administration official derisively referred to rationalists as “the reality-based community,” bragging that when you’re the ones with the political power, you make your own reality. It is either intellectual dishonesty or intellectual laziness, but one way or the other it is killing (or perhaps has already killed) all prospects for rational, civil discourse on the issues of the day, whether held in the halls of Congress or on the pages of Facebook.
So those in power continue to wallow in the mud and do nothing but calculate how to win the next election, and the rest of us relegate our social interactions to posting what we had for breakfast on our Facebook status.
Related reading: Building a Nation of Know-Nothings
