Antiintellectualism is not just some partisan slur about Muricans, any more than is observing their suffusion with Puritan ideas about any sort of pleasure - our living contradiction with that mindset AND the unarguable preoccupation with sex, selling everything with it too (as would follow living under repression of naturalness).

Dunno about you, but I've always found these characteristics of my fellow Muricans to be a constant nagging background to every political hackphrase, each new reduction of fine principles to blab.. since I could first grok the fact of the duplicity, the deception throughout our every campaign. Even for dogcatcher.

Saying "live with it", is just the ovine response to every grating habit which the vox populi seem unable to kick. While periodically this knownothingism appears to recede (?) it's right back there, any next November.

I guess it's just the intentional suffering which comes with living amidst a group whose cohesion is largely fantasy-based, a la Disneyland and the Murican Dream (now a reg. feature of Fannie Mae - as an actual incessant ad. Even on NPR radio!). We are a large assemblage of quite disparate sub-groups. 'Unity' as expressed by W et al.. is as farcical an idea as, that oft mentioned aquatic ceremony by which Authority is transferred from one Yahoo to the next.

Maybe only some ultra-Large *Shock* could ever alter these characteristics. Best not to hope for a shock That large, though..


Ashton