Growing apart

Nine months ago I retired to follow my wife's job to Mississippi. And while my personal life is wonderful, my mental health is good and my emotions are generally upbeat, I am constantly bombarded with negatives from my environment.

For example, the person or persons who installed a red top on the hot water pipe behind the washer. And the person or persons who installed a red top on the cold water pipe behind the washer. Everywhere I turn in Mississippi I see incompetence and stupidity acted out in front of me. So much so that my normally seemingly inexhaustible rage seems to be... exhausted.

Being retired leaves me more time on line. Previous virtually all of my online reading was technical in nature, keeping up in my profession and the technologies in use in my profession. Slashdot was pretty much the only news-oriented type site which I read and mostly because Slashdot is a good site to keep a general eye on the type of technology with which I worked. For the last nine months I've read much more widely than that, and I have to tell you, a few hours following links on the internet and reading post and comments and even the most jaded stupidity hater will end up slack jawed in disbelief at the level of stupidity expressed in the opinions and ramblings stored on the servers of the world. I've read rants so ridiculous and delirious that the poster thinking they were the Emperor Napoleon would be one step closer to reality for them. People that make even my old college buddy, the one who thought he had a magical high school ring, seem sane.

There are some exceptions. I've found the world of atheist blogging, where the majority of posters are sane and reasonable and intelligent. Recently on alternet.org I read the following article http://tinyurl.com/dy53hj If "mainstream" religious nuts are dropping out, either turning more to the rational or the more extreme evangelical nuts, then there is a widening gap between those choosing to live in reality as much as possible and those choosing to live in fantasy as much as possible.

In Mississippi you still see, in the general population, the vast difference between rich and poor that dates all the back to the Civil war, and the US history of favoring large accumulations of capital (and how the oligarchs who make decisions of those accumulations of capital take advantage of the US political system) means that the huge socioeconomic gap in Mississippi is being mirrored all over the country.

Our current President is articulate, and this gets him charged as "elitist." Is stupidity now a goal? Are we headed for the society at the opening of Kornbluth's "March of the Morons?"

We are not melting anymore. We are separating. One of Heinlein's characters once opined that whatever particular government you instituted didn't really matter as long as there were sufficient avenues for advancement by merit. "Merit" is now not only running behind wealth and connections (which it pretty much always has), but it is now under attack by "spin" and "image" (again, backed by money). When attempts to correct information in the public sphere only end up serving to reinforce the original false claims, where are we as a society?

The fact of the matter is, most people cannot handle facts. (Consider the creationists flopping all across the public sphere, pretending that they are scientists.) If more people are working with fantasy rather than reality, then more than the US banking and mortgage industry is due to be reacquainted with Kipling's "Gods of the Copybook Headings":

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!