America: A Nation of Peter Griffin's and Homer Simpson's

Sometimes I wonder what has happened to America. On the one hand you have folk who occupy themselves with celebrity culture and reality television and on the other, extreme zealots that use presupposed intellect to propound lunacy and outright hatred. In either instance, both sides of the above coin redefine idiocy and make it seem like stupidity has replaced suma cum laude.

Now as far as the first side goes, they are just as dangerous as the race baiting, islamaphobic nativist that are on the other end of the continuum and equally as dangerous. They tend to know when Lil Wayne is getting out of prison and how many times Lindsey Lohan has been arrested that who is their representative in the state senate or how to solve a polynomial.

It is this segment of the population mainly responsible for America ranking 26 in the world in math, science and reading comprehension. There book is the music video and they read TMZ and other entertainment blogs as if the information they contained was just as valuable as the Wall Street Journal. They are more apt to spend time in clubs, bars, lenox mall and the local car wash than the PTA, library, or helping their kids do homework.

Unfortunately these folk are not our nations only problem, for on the other end of the spectrum is a cavalcade of ignorance just as appalling. Although rather knowledgeable, this group lacks the ability to lucidly employ reason, problem solve or think critically. They unlike the previous who are oblivious to all outside the entertainment industry and have a penchant to allow fear and the disability of retrograde amnesia with respect to history, to direct their understanding of the world.


It seems these folk hate all that is not reflective of traditional White Anglo Saxon Protestant culture. The hate the current president for several reasons – that he is Black, has a name unlike theirs and that he lives in the Whitehouse. They even compare him to both Hitler and Stalin, while forgetting these two fought against each other in World War 2 and that on the down low, they believe in the racial superiority that Hitler preached. They have a disdain for other ethnic groups and religions for example, like Muslims and immigrants in particularly from Mexico; while confidently forgetting they come from similar origins.

Using the example of Islam, they forget theirs a history of Popes Innocent the III and Gregory IX, who massacred and murdered people, conducted the inquisition against heretics in the name of their one true God and religion – Christianity. Doing the work of a God in their views supported the beheading of non-believers and burning them at the stake. No different than the horrid beliefs of Islamic Sharia Law in my purview regarding infidels.

Or the case of Mexican immigrants, forgetting how they came to these lands without papers, illegally, cutting off heads of the Native Americans who were here before them, murdering women and children in order to steal their land – this too in the name of their white god.

This America I live in is backwards. They pray for TI not to go to prison but let Mumia Abu Jamal rot in prison with no interest. They applaud Thomas Jefferson as a founding father but ignore his documented goal to take without trade, the land of Native Americans and his wish for their extermination. I even just read a piece by John Avlon of the Daily Beast noting that 46 books have been published demonizing President Obama in his first two years of office compared to 6 and 11 for George Bush and Bill Clinton at the same period of their presidencies.

So why? Why is this bivalve of my America in 2010? Took me a while to come to a reasonable conclusion but all I could come up with was that this nation has been reduced to these types of people. One the one side, there are the Homer Simpsons and on the other, the Peter Griffins. The rest of us are in the middle shaking our heads, moving them from left to right as if we are watching a tennis match.