Opinion: The dumbing down of America and her scorn for fact

by RALPH WEST

As a reader for the SAT-II essays recently administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), I remember well the perceptions shared by the chief reader, Agnes Yamada. The chief reader is responsible for establishing a tone and overseeing the sense of standards that prevail at each reading, a nationally chosen gathering of teachers at both the college and high school levels. I recall her convincing explanation for the reasons a student paper should be placed in the "lower half" of student essays: it was, as she noted, "repetitive and lacking in factual support." I remember being struck that these qualities -- repetitiveness and a lack of factual support -- which a national consensus of teachers attributes to inferior thought are a perfect hallmark of George W. Bush's supposedly successful campaign for the presidency.

It is by no means clear that Mr. Bush won a victory in 2004 any more legitimate than his "victory" in 2000; it is abundantly clear, however, that he reached quite deeply into the red-state mentality with a number of repeated canards, either stated or insinuated, that have no factual support whatsoever. "We are all safer now that Saddam Hussein is behind bars." [There is no evidence to support this; on the contrary, Iraq is more dysfunctional than ever, and our policies are breeding many more terrorists.] "We need to fight the terrorists on their own home territory rather than let them fight on ours." [This conflation of Osama Bin Laden's terrorists with Saddam Hussein's Iraq is willfully misleading.] "Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."[Another willful lie.]

I suspect I was not the only reader at ETS struck by our widespread failure as educators to inculcate our standards into the population. A line of thinking commonly found, by a nationwide gathering of professional educators, to be inferior was found by the red-state voters to be perfectly acceptable for a presidential campaign.

And the fallout from this is very worrisome and distressing. As a nation, we are in danger of becoming dysfunctional in the era of George W. Bush. A C-student who used his connections to gain admission to both Andover and Yale, he has made it abundantly clear, in his non-intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, that he has learned virtually nothing of substance from either of these places. He simply took space in both institutions -- space that could better have been used by someone who might have actually had the wherewithal and desire to expand his mind while attending them -- and slid his way through them to become the absurd posturer we see today. Clearly, intellectual substance and development was and is not a "value" for him, to apply one of the neocons' favorite terms.

Mr. Bush and the voters who supported him have become perfect reflections of each other in their contempt for fact. At bookstores of our National Park Service, we see books like "Grand Canyon, a Different View," by a park ranger, who, by his testimony, has "met the Lord" and who now holds that "according to a Biblical time scale" the canyon "can't possibly be more than a few thousand years old." And, in certain public schools, we learn that the creationists have succeeded in affixing stickers inside textbook covers that say the process of evolution is faith-based theory, totally overlooking the solid factual evidence supporting the process.

Mr. Bush's minions attempt to dismantle stem-cell research despite the solid scientific evidence supporting the immense promise this research holds for resolving the afflictions of Parkinson's disease and spinal injuries. Worst of all, we have ongoing wars waged with as much disdain for fact as creationist theory. George W. Bush, as a born-again Christian, receives his marching orders from God himself -- like the above-mentioned park ranger, he has met the Lord -- and he is so sure of his cause that the deaths of one hundred thousand innocent Iraqis, not to mention the maimings and deaths of our own G.I.s, as well as the virtually universal contempt of the civilized world, are far less important than his divine war and the hegemony of what he calls his "base." His devotion to the sanctity of life rings just a wee bit hollow in this context. War, constant unending war -- first Iraq and who knows what else? Never mind the facts that Mr. Bush's wars are undermining the Christian witness he claims to bear; that they are tactically stupid in depleting our resources and diverting attention from real threats elsewhere; and that his Iraq invasion lacks the factual bases he claimed: W.M.D. and an al-Qaeda connection. And, of course, he conveniently overlooks the reality that, when our intelligence agencies were warning us of an incipient terrorist attack, the Republicans, with their characteristic disregard for fact, were too preoccupied with hounding Bill Clinton about his boudoir antics to pay attention.

The danger in the anti-intellectual mentality -- the mentality of a C-student -- is its contagiousness. It seems to me it may be just a matter of time before countries like Japan, China and India, to name a few, bypass us in technological advances. True, the blue-state bastions (the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and the West Coast) still have a great deal of the intellectual firepower that supports our nation. But what a come-down we are suffering with this man! In the sharpest possible contrast with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and even lesser fry like John F. Kennedy, we have a dumbed-down "leader" who appeals to the worst in our country. One has to wonder whether we are headed back toward the Middle Ages and their theocracies.

Chestnut Hill resident Ralph West is a teacher and has been a scorer for many years for the Educational Testing Service.