Dumbing Down to Greatness

Dear George,

To begin with, let me apologize for missing last night’s State of the Union speech. It wasn’t for a lack of effort that I was absent. I was tuned in and ready to be inspired. Unfortunately, I fired up a pipe so I could better channel the cosmic dimensions of your vision. I might have lit up a little too early, because I only got as far as the Sergeant-of-Arms announcing “The President of the United States,” and then I slid into another dimension of reality and everything sort of went black.

But I’ve no doubt it inspired and uplifted, for you are a man of vision, all vision, and nothing else except vision. And I, alone, understand your vision and where it is taking us. Great nations are great because they are great, and they stay great by insuring their greatness. This has been the thrust of your seven-plus years in office.

The question is how do we finance this greatness? We do so by defunding everything except the Pentagon. Great nations stay great by kicking ass, and it is getting more and more expensive to do so.

Defunding has been the main thrust of your administration. You tried to take down Social Security, but ran into too much opposition to do so. Not to worry. Moody’s is in your corner, now, with their threat to downgrade the United State’s credit rating because of our Social Security and Medicare expenses. This will enable you to take the issue out of the political arena and move it into the economic arena where decisions are made without getting involved in debate and discussion since economics is a science much as the ancient practice of augury was.

Instead, you have focused on one area that is still sucking too much money out of the public till—education. You made a big step with your “No Child Left Behind”. Now, instead of educating, teachers spend their time teaching test-taking skills.

But, you’ve still miles to go before you sleep.

You well understand that you dilute education’s appeal and influence by dumbing down society, and you are fortunate in that society seems to be doing most of the heavy lifting for you. Pick up the latest issue of Time magazine and compare it with one published in 1940. Gone are the complex and compound sentence; gone is the college-level prose. What remains is a sterile syntax that a simpleton could comprehend. Hell, even Microsoft® is getting into the act. The grammar check on their Word 2007® no longer gigs the writer for passive verbs, contractions or ending a sentence with a proposition.

Another tactic is to outsource hi-tech jobs overseas or import foreign workers to do the same work at half the cost. Why should Americans bother with a higher education if it won’t get them a good job? (This is one of the advantages of reducing education to a form of vocational training. Nobody ever goes to school to learn how to think, or to learn how to appreciate literature or art.)

The idea is to change the face of labor market until the sole jobs available are low-paying jobs in the service sector that only require a grade-school education. I’m sure you know how much money we could save were we able to eliminate middle and high schools, along with colleges. Have one of your bean counters figure out how many weapons systems the savings could buy.

A side benefit is that uneducated drones don’t demonstrate or cause trouble. They are too damn exhausted working the three or four jobs necessary to survive. Never forget that the rebellion of the sixties was driven by over-educated college kids. You must do all in your power to insure that Americans become too stupid to ever mount a repeat of that aberration.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones