Maybe I’m being a little melodramatic but I’ve finally started reading Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles Pierce and my doom-and-gloom meter is needling farther toward doom. You really need to pick up this book.

I know that’s a uniquely appealing recommendation (“buy the book, it’ll make you depressed!”), but it really is a whip-smart, wry and erudite study of the history of our country and our complicated relationship with cranks, loons, hucksters, political opportunists and religious nuts. Its thesis is that modern technology has allowed these assorted cranks to rocket to prominence in a way that our founding fathers never imagined possible in the days before TV and the internet. The author looks fondly on the founding of a country that was largely built upon the aftermath of soul-scarring religious persecution and laments how the vibrant plurality they created has gradually flipped to the situation we have today — where the charlatans, religious hucksters and unscrupulous liars in politics drown out the rational, sane and intelligent voices in our polity.

In essence, our country has gradually come to the point where large portions of the population glorify, and lavish respect upon, ignorance and nonsense — to the exclusion of any respect for the experts and intellectuals they decry as “elites”.

I’m still not all the way through but it’s bringing me back to a core question I’ve been pondering ever since a few years into the Bush administration:

Are we doomed as a country?

I know that every generation engages in various musings about how the current age is one of wickedness and decline.

But when you factor in:

1. the multiple existential crises that confront us (e.g. dwindling oil reserves, rising global temperatures, the bankrupting of our treasury due to two unpaid-for wars, a financial system that nearly bankrupted us that will soon do it again because they will likely avoid any serious future regulation, etc.);

2. the serious abuses to our core values as a country that have gone on over the last eight years (e.g., torture, extraordinary rendition in order to torture, suspension of habeas corpus, indefinite detention, murder of terrorism suspects in custody, erosion of our civil liberties in the name of national security, warrantless wiretapping, etc.); and
3. the near-complete lack of societal or political will to seriously address any or all of the foregoing;

it’s really hard for me — an otherwise rational person not normally predisposed to getting the vapors — to not seriously consider buying some guns, building a bunker somewhere, and waiting for the Chinese to invade (or foreclose).

I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on the matter. Am I just being gloomy and melodramatic? Or are we about to fall off a steep cliff (or have we fallen off already)?

Update: For those of you who may be frightened off by my gloomy reaction to reading the book, also consider this bit from a Facebook comment I just made:

One thing I think the book does really well is feed strength and knowledge to one’s fight against the forces of ignorance and nonsense.

Whether we win that battle — and successfully advance the cause of humanity evolving past its frightened, medieval, ignorant, reactionary and unthinking core — is another story altogether.