But the manner and (lack of) decorum which he brought to the White House has palpably changed the interpersonal vibe between individuals with differing opinions in this nation. There is no middle ground now. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: several former presidents have expressed their regret that the partisan nature of two-party politics has whittled the "moderate middle" down to virtually nothing in Congress, and in much of political thought in the media and in the culture as a whole. (Former Presidents Clinton, Bush 43, and Carter have all said as much in my hearing, thanks to pre-recording.) George Washington spent his entire Farewell Address pleading with those that came after him not to go down that road; yet the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians did exactly that. The names have changed, the roles have changed, but the battles continue - and in 2018, they're as divided as ever.
But even more than that (as I started to say before wandering on that rabbit trail!), it's the decorum that's gone missing under the influence of a leader who possesses none of it. Courtesy and diplomacy have been replaced by "My nuclear button is bigger than yours" and "she was bleeding out of her...".
And that seeps into our everyday life. My students are prime examples: conversation with each other or with their elders are indistinguishable for politeness or appropriateness. Word choice is questionable at best. Lying is de riguer. Insubordination is a regular occurrence in my classroom these days, from students whose likely success in their lives ahead diminishes with every poor choice they make.
Which leads to the motivation for this particular melancholy point.
Long before the "election" of our current President (thank you, Electoral college), the "dumbing down" of America had been in full swing. It's unfortunately far too easy to predict the political preference of an American by their apparent educational level, although men and women alike who went to college and absorbed nothing except perhaps beer while there may have to be factored in. When evidence is plentiful and yet one continues to believe a falsehood, it's fair to question the innate intelligence of that person. When logic fails to sway a person from a belief that comes from unknown and questionable sources, that person's belief system can be legitimately questioned. When someone can look at two different people who commit the exact same action and judge them differently because of (fill in the blank: political party, skin color, personal persuasion), their hypocrisy has a root; increasingly, however, it's not so much that it's intentionally malicious as it is a personal blinding to objective reason.
And that lack of self-awareness has transformed the landscape of America. It is the widespread virulent disease form of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the delusion of a person whose intelligence is too low for them to realize that there even exist things they don't know, much less what those things are. Our President, sad to say, is the role model for this. He honestly believes he knows more about everything in existence than everyone else in existence, and is occasionally brought to reality. It's why he refuses all intelligence briefings, preferring to rely on his own innate instincts (and Fox News). Think back to his 2017 conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, where in ten minutes he learned that he didn't know much after all:
Then Trump welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to his estate at Mar-a-Lago on April 6 — and everything changed. By the president’s own account, as told to the Wall Street Journal, the two men briefly chatted about the history of Chinese-Korean relations. The conversation rocked Trump’s world.
“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” the president told the Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea. ... But it’s not what you would think.”
Town (Jenny Town, Johns Hopkins University) called Trump’s approach to North Korea “naive” in our correspondence, and this is a perfect example of what she’s talking about. The president claims to have come to a profound realization about one of the most dangerous conflicts on earth after a 10-minute conversation with the leader of North Korea’s chief patron, which also happens to be the United States’ chief rival in East Asia.
And that feeling long ago permeated the American populace, perhaps starting in force with the "Me Generation" era of the 1980's, where we were expected to rely on our innate skills and intelligence for the upward mobility of the only person that mattered. (As a Christian, you can probably articulate my rant of a response without my help, so I'll forego it for how. Suffice it to say, God would disagree.) Where it has brought us, in my 35 year career as a teacher which just happens to coincide with the time from that focus on "Me" to now, is the diminishing respect shown for education as a whole and the need for one's own education in particular. I have in my classroom as we speak about a half-dozen students (see yesterday's post for a more detailed description). Ostensibly, I am here to do more than just handle the administrative paperwork for them: I have decades of training in math and language arts instruction (admittedly, my music education training is far more advanced, but mostly irrelevant here), and am available at a moment's notice to assist any of these young men on any topic they have in front of them.
I've answered one academic question in two days.
In the meantime, I've dealt with a plethora of motivational conversations, imploring these lost souls to utilize the opportunity they've been given to turn their academic life around and get pointed back in the right direction, towards graduation. However, to be blunt, that doesn't interest any of them. So, rather than being a teacher, I get to be a prison guard instead.
When did school become a four-letter word? (Don't count letters - it's a metaphor.)
When did knowledge, education, and intelligence become dirty words? We look at the statistics about how many doctors and scientists we have to import, how many such students at our major higher ed institutions were coming in from outside the US (until we started making ourselves a pariah and putting out the "not welcome" sign), and bemoan the "brain drain" in this country - but it's exactly what we've strived for over the last few decades! The smart person on television is invariably the "nerd", the awkward dweeb stuck in the corner at the dance while the "cool dudes" who skip class all the time are lauded by their multiple good-looking babes on their arms.
It's far too late to meaningfully reverse these effects, in my opinion, before the Rapture comes and we have far more important issues to deal with (if you're still on the planet at that point). But it would be nice to leave behind a group of people who are able to read Revelation when it becomes relevant to their well-being.
Not that they'll read it then, either. That's too much of a "brainiac" thing to do.
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