“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Under the Microscope

by Glynn Wilson

As I was lounging on the screened-in porch Saturday afternoon sipping a Yuengling and counting the birds for the Great Backyard Birdcount, with the Nikon at the ready as dusk approached, the phone rang.

A friend called and said he had free tickets to a party at the WORKPLAY music hall on Birmingham’s Southside. It was the second anniversary of WJOX Sports Monster radio’s morning drive show “Opening Drive” with Del Greco, along with former University of Alabama quarterback Jay Barker and someone named Bone. Since I don’t listen to talk radio, and certainly not sports talk radio, I was ambivalent at best.

But I was told “there will be local radio celebrities there.” And with nothing better to do and since I’ve never seen a show at the much ballyhooed WORKPLAY, and since I was informed I would not have to drive and drink on Alabama’s over-patrolled highways, I said what the heck.

After watching these small-time local celebs party – remember, Jay Barker couldn’t make it in the pros – I came away thinking that the poor people of Birmingham Alabama are some of the dumbest redneck slobs on the planet. There was not an IQ above about 110 in the room.

You can always tell that when everybody at a party is drinking Bud Lite and eating chicken wings, fawning over people who are famous just because they mutter about sports over the radio airwaves. They wouldn’t know real news if it dropped on their heads from a falling space satellite.

The most fun anyone can have at a party like that is sitting back drinking a Sweetwater 420 (of course they didn’t have the Sweet Georgia Brown), and watching the local Britney Spears wannabes coming and going from the ladies room, where they were no doubt powdering their noses with something besides makeup.

Do young people still actually snort cocaine in the bathroom? I thought that went out of style when George W. Bush was elected as the Christian Republican president. But maybe it was the knowledge that Bush was a coke-head in his day that inspired some of those votes.

I suspected I was in the room with a bunch of people who still support the dumbest president in American history anyway, so I didn’t talk politics with anyone there. It would have been a useless exercise.

They all support Alabama Governor Bob Riley too, I’m sure, and actually believe that the state’s economy is still booming. I doubt any of them have had to recently default on a balloon, subprime mortgage, and they just take their little paychecks from Alabama Power, AT and T, the State Farm and Liberty National Life insurance companies, along with Advent Communications and Wachovia Bank.

Very few of them have ever been to New York, Washington, D.C., or a real art gallery, and I’m sure they proudly count themselves among the 40 percent of Americans who did not read a single book in the last year. Many of them most likely have been to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl, however, although I’m sure they spent their entire time there on Bourbon Street and have no idea what the Garden District looks like.

I insisted we leave early, before midnight, since the soundman for the rock band chosen for the occasion obviously had mud in his ears.

Then as I woke up this morning and started reading the Sunday papers online, I ran into a pleasant and relevant, enlightening surprise on the Washington Post’s Sunday op-ed section “Outlook.”

The Post’s editorial page is mostly a fairly boring read, and it is not something I pay a lot of attention to since the paper’s editorial board has mostly been supportive of the ill-fated Iraq war. But this is a guest column by an academic with a new book out called The Age of American Unreason.

Here’s the column link:
The Dumbing Of America: We’re a Nation of Dunces

Now I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had on this subject over the past couple of decades. But I assure you, dear intelligent readers, this is a recurring subject among national academic and media types. I doubt it comes up much in the Birmingham News newsroom, where the anti-intellectualism is obviously as rampant as it is in the general population who listen to WJOX.

I don’t agree with all of Susan Jacoby’s analysis, since she falls into the trap of blaming the Internet as much as TV. And of course she longs for those summer days when she read books in a tree house. The problem with that part of her nostalgic analysis is that her local library in those days could not compare to the massive amount of information available within seconds on the World Wide Web, including books.

It simply does not matter whether people seek out good information on the Web or in print – as long as they seek out good information. She is right that fewer people seem to be doing that. Instead, they are more than ever dependant on local TV and radio personalities for information, which often turns out to be bad information.

I guess I should be worried that the PR people for WJOX and Work Play will get mad at me for this stinging critique of their event. But somehow, I doubt they could find their way to this Website if they tried. They are too busy drinking Bud Lite and listening to small time local celebs gush on and on about football, when the football season is still seven months away.

If you, dear smart readers who did find this Website, want to read something with a little more intellectual heft about what is going on in Alabama, check out the latest post from our highly prolific lawyer and writer friend at Harpers.org, Scott Horton.

No Time for Rest in the War on Teachers

We’ll have more to report on this soon, as well as some fairly exciting news about a new Web news venture in the works out of Montgomery.

If you know any Alabama dumbasses who have not found this Website yet, why don’t you tell them about it. It may piss them off, but just maybe they will learn something – and we can begin to turn this slide into unreality around, little by little.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Under the Microscope III. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.