Aug 9, 2008

Imbecilized

On the day Russia invaded Georgia, the top story in the news is John Edwards's affair. That is so incredibly stupid that I can't find adequate words to describe it. It is a perfect occasion to quote Zbigniew Brzezinski from a few weeks ago:
And we’re probably as ignorant as ever about the rest of the world, because everybody now lives in a kind of simplistic, trivialized virtual reality in which fact and fiction, impressions and impulses, are mixed up in an incoherent fashion. The public really has no grasp of complexities, no sense of intellectual refinement in judging them, and our political leaders have become increasingly demagogic. The way George W. Bush campaigned for the war in Iraq, with reference to fictitious WMDs, and with sweeping, simplistic, black-and-white generalizations about freedom and tyranny, is a case in point. But he was responding to our increasingly imbecilized societal condition. This is very troublesome.

Imbecilized. The perfect adjective for our society. Zbig, you da man.

2 comments:

Mike said...

Given McCain's VP choice, it would be useful to know the histogram of outcomes, especially during the first four years. If the risk of death or incapacitation is even a few percent during the first year, that would seem worth taking into account if you have any concern that Palin may not be quite ready to be commander-in-chief.

Mike said...

Oops! Above comment was meant to go with the entry concerning McCain's actuarial statistics.