How's it going where you are?

[HassleCat]

I hang out at McDonalds for the free Internet. I get a pretty good feel for the local Zeitgeist. I live in a big retirement area, and most of the people are older, more conservative, cranky, etc. School bond measures never pass here because all the retired people vote them down. They refuse to support public anything. You get the picture.

Anyway, hoards of people around here have been discussing the Republican debates, and they are so favorably impressed I have to wonder if they watched the Republican debates on some other planet. They love that plain speaking, common sense, conventional wisdom stuff. They give glowing reviews to any candidate who hits them with the old, "You know better than the experts!" They seem to believe someone who dropped out of high school to work in the lumber mill knows more about global climate change than someone with a PhD in climatology. If you need to track the decay of an element in the lanthanide chain, you would ask your Chevy dealer, right?

Anyway, I'm getting the idea many of my fellow citizens don't trust smart people. Ben Carson is smart, but he's willing to act stupid, so people forgive him for being a neurosurgeon. The rest of them don't have to pretend. Does anyone else notice this? Is this the way people talk in your community?

[cilla4progress]

1. I think if I were you

I'd have to move!

I did make a comment in the grocery line when I saw one of the national rag magazines headline: "Hillary Clinton Headed to Jail." I mused out loud how they get away with it. A woman replied, "low information voters." I was surprised since I live in a mostly conservative area also, although there is a good strong nugget of we progressives!!

[HassleCat]

2. I saw that headline, too

Sometimes they put something like that on the cover. When you read the article, it reveals Hillary Clinton visited some inmates at the county jail. Something like that.

[Newsjock]

3. Yes

Since it's generally regarded in much of Murika that "smart people" got "us" into "this mess" (define these terms however you wish), the thinking is that "we" shouldn't expect the "smart people" to "fix" things.

It's a dangerous age of anti-intellectualism that has no shortage of scary precedents in world history.