Study: One in 1,000 Know First Amendment

The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

Since the constitution has been Bush gutted, perhaps these gifted Amerikkkans assume it is useless to bother with anything so obliterated and defunct as an amendment.

After all, destruction of first amendment rights is one big weapon in the perpetual "war on terror" (oddly fought with plenty of terrifying administration pronouncements and amping the fear level).

However, I suspect these Simpson fans really simply prefer watching TV to doing anything else.

When one considers the abundant wisdom purveyed by televised treasures like The Simpsons, South Park, Taxi, Mash, Friends and Survivor, one can't help but grasp why the public knows the shows better than the constitution.
Obviously TV has more relevance to their lives than that silly constitution.
And you get all that information from TV, including what products to buy, without having to work for it.

I mention the above list of programs out of thousands I could name not to single them out as especially bad, but because I've never seen them, though I've had friends who were so obsessed with them, who talked about them so much I feel I understand their basic premise and recognize their characters.
I don't feel I've missed anything by not viewing the programs. Nor am I sorry not to have been able to participate in conversations about Hawkeye, Bart and Ross. TV is not for participation anyway.
Besides, I've viewed plenty of television in my life, though nothing like what most people have seen.
My taste in junk is just different.

Sitcoms and reality shows are boring ideas, at least when they aren't politically offensive ideas, which they often are. The last sitcom I loved was Bewitched when I was 7. Magic always saved the day. The witches were morally superior to the mortals and much more fun.

The religious wrong would protest Bewitched right off the airwaves now, America's love of freedom and respect for difference has been so damaged in recent decades.

Most sitcoms are glossy, packaged parades of shallowness and stereotype that Amerikkka mistakes for reality. Such programs are vehicles for selling junk, including junk ideas.
There is nothing of social or intellectual value in them, little of value at all, except to the people who make millions of dollars making them.

The news is trash too. That something as overtly propagandistic as Fox is considered journalism, and professional polemicists like Chris Matthews and professional idiots like Wolf Blitzer pass for journalists is truly appalling.
20 years of Tom Brokaw mouthing into the camera without any clue as to what he was saying is truly appalling.
ABC, NBC and CBS delivering disinformation night after night while the TV viewing public has NO IDEA what is going on in the world is truly appalling.
People who watch the History Channel and think it presents accurate information about history are appalling.
Though I love the Science Channel (see, I told you) I realize it often presents dated and slanted information and often presents information without much depth.
I know that because I read. A lot.

But it isn't just that kind of TV trash, that sitcom and news show trash, that is dumbing down Amerikkka.

All television is trash and none of us would miss a thing if we chose to never view any of it again. It is the great time waster that allows people to avoid reality in their politics, relationships and in their heads, too.
I can't count the times people have made ignorant assertions to me about our current political situation, and when I called them on it they defended their ignorance by saying they don't have time to read about politics, even though I know they watch hours of TV a week .

There is an underlying assumption that the content of TV is trustworthy, reliable, inviolable.

But it isn't even that. It is the loss of active participation, the lapse into thinking that is never critical and is always, invariably passive. Just the act of watching TV is passive. Sitting still, head unmoving, dissociating into some sort of consumer fugue, having your attention fragmented over and over by commercials, well, none of that is very healthy for your mind.

But many highly opinionated people have their TV on all the time. And they feel informed until someone who is truly informed challenges one of their assertions.
These TV watchers are mostly the same people who cannot drive a car or walk down a street without talking on a cell phone.
The problem is not just television sponsored political ignorance in Amerikkka, but there is a problem with being alone. The national aversion to taking time to reflect or ask questions is part of the political decay.

So even though most everyone has an opinion, a large number of people have no real knowledge of what they are talking about, but feel so suffused with information and wisdom from watching TV, they don't even perceive their own ignorance. FOKKKs viewers are especially bad this way. But anyone who gets the bulk of their information from corporate media suffers this ignorance.

The widespread dissemination of all this nonsense, this junk information, this intellectual paralysis, through cable TV over the last 20 to 30 years appears to have finished any democratic impulses off in the average citizen. When the citizenry does not grasp what their rights are they certainly won't fight to defend them, certainly won't fight to stop fascists like BushCo from taking them away. Of course. The content of the constitution has no importance when all we are interested in is keeping the darkies, terrorists, homosexual at bay, in stopping the "Arabization of Amerikkka", as my right wing neighbor called some phenomena he sees and believes - he's a FOX news watcher - that I have never observed at all.

Sad truth that the airwaves which belong to the public are being used to undermine the very democracy that grants them the control they no longer know they have.