TODAY - February 5, 2008:  Super Tuesday with the Maui Curmudgeon. 
If you want to understand American politics, it is helpful to begin with Winston Churchill and Edward Gibbon. When Churchill was a very young man stationed in India, the ambitious officer decided to become a great writer.  He wrote to his mother to send him a complete copy of Edward Gibbon’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” In the 20th century, Churchill wrote that he could think at that time of no better way to understand the power of language than studying one of its finest executors.Churchill is in good company in this assessment. From the opening lines of this great work, every reader can tell he’s in the hands of a master communicator:

In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of
Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most
civilized portion of mankind.  The frontiers of that extensive
monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor.
The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had
gradually cemented the union of the provinces.  Their peaceful
inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and
luxury.  The image of a free constitution was preserved with
decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the
sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the
executive powers of government.

Churchill’s lessons worked. People have become somewhat used to politicians winning Nobel prizes.  (President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Albert Gore are two examples.) However, unlike most politicians, Churchill did not win his Nobel for peace but rather for literature.

The genius that Churchill saw in Gibbon has been well studied today.  One of the finest professors of classic literature is Dr. Jay Fears of the University of Oklahoma.  He holds the chair in the History of Liberty and is considered one of the leading experts on Gibbon. Fears says like many geniuses, Gibbon expresses himself so well he can be summarized distinctly.

Gibbon’s title begs the question: what caused the decline and fall of the Roman empire?  The answer lies in a single sentence: Romans relinquished their freedoms for perceived security.  Had they not done that, Fears says, the empire in fact might be with us still.

That the United States faces a similar issue can’t be questioned. Like so many Roman emperors, the current occupier of the White House bullied his way into power illegally and has wrought a huge path of destruction and despair.  Americans have given up their freedoms with their perception that such a sacrifice guarantees security. Like the Romans before them, they are wrong.

But I would argue that Americans put a twist onto this political labyrinth of thought: incredible stupidity and ignorance.

Where to begin?  When Gibbon published his book it was met with immediate acclaim and became a bestseller throughout the world for decades, and for centuries was required reading in most institutions of higher learning. Many revere such well-expressed books still.  In a recent survey, the average European reads four books a year.  46% of Americans do not read any books in any year. This self-imposed ignorance plays into the hands and machinations of the worst of American political practitioners.

American stupidity has had a long and storied history but perhaps no single event shows Americans at their worst than the Civil War. 

Despite a crushing loss to the north, Southerners maintained a standard of living based on racism, inhumanity, and illegality for a hundred years.  Finally, when civil rights was rammed down their throats, the growing populace of ignorant Americans simply subsumed their hatreds, buried them in Christian banalities, and set about to destroy what little American freedom was left by choosing politicians who mirrored their ugly thoughts and practices.

To this day Americans are confused with how the states which had for so long been Democratic in name has become so conservatively Republican in practice.  But there is no confusion at all.  Democrats and Republicans are merely labels.  Ugly Americans are not interested in the labels but rather what they are promised by anyone.  After civil rights legislation was passed in 1964, the South begin its shift to the party which promised them comfort to continue their ignorance and their low way of life.

Thus, the myth that Ronald Reagan drew Democrats to his party is just that. 

The Reagan Democrats were merely ignorant Americans looking for philosophical warmth.  Reagan gave it to them. They didn’t give a damn if you called it democrat or republican, just so long as they could continue to feel at home in their unintelligence.

Lest any reader protest that such ignorance is exaggerated and not widespread, particularly today, I would point out one recent example from the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina.  By that time in the election process, John McCain was leading George W. Bush.  One of Bush’s slimy associates, Karl Rove, created, printed, and distributed a small brochure which claimed that John McCain had fathered a black child through an illegitimate affair with a black woman.  South Carolinians, ever anxious to review their roots, were appalled, and voted for Bush.

Since Reagan, what has changed is not the shallow political philosophy of an increasing number of Americans, but rather the indistinctness between those running for office regardless of political affiliation. Let me give you just one example.  The following are two quotes:

“I’m asking you to believe.  Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington, I’m asking you to believe in yours…My values are essentially American values.”

“The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas-a trial of spiritual resolve: the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.”

Think a moment and tell me which quote is from Ronald Reagan and which quote is from Barack Obama.

The real point of course is that it doesn’t matter because they say the same thing. I don’t know why that is.  Perhaps it’s because so many Americans are entrenched in their despicable thoughts and beliefs that the only way a national politician can be elected is to appeal to them in the same terms over and over and over and over. (Churchill once said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” I cannot help but think that he thought of this after meeting an American from a Red State.)

Frankly, what astounds me about this political season is that so many people really think that Barack Obama represents a wave of change and a new hope for America, when the words he uses are no different than Ronald Reagan’s or George Bush’s. I think I understand why most Americans who do read, who are open to new ideas, and who are practiced in critical thinking, are desperate for the thoughts expressed by Obama when he talks about unity and togetherness.

I also believe, though, that however today’s Super Tuesday primary results fall out, that everyone involved in the process has missed a crucial point.

Since the founding fathers first embedded into our Constitution the notion that non-white people are 3/5ths human, there has been an unbridgeable gap, both politically and philosophically, between those of intelligence and humanity, and the majority of Americans, proponents of ignorance and hatred.  This difference has not been bridged over 230 years, through a civil war, two world wars, right up to today, when black men accused of raping white women 30 years ago are only now being released from prison because of advances in DNA testing, men who were put there by the very same prejudice and ignorance.

To my mind, the politician of the future, the one who brings the most hope for an island of sanity and intelligence, the one who may indeed bring about the conversion once and for all of this divided nation into what it now needs to become — 2 nations — is a politician who will not tout how we all need to play together nicely, but rather a person who will finally recognize that stupidity is genetic, ignorance is passed along generation to generation without fail, and that the two competing American political philosophies are so fundamentally opposed there can be no reconciliation.  The best that we can hope for is the peaceful recognition of this reality and an application of changing processes to evolve this once promising country from what it really is today - an unmendable patchwork quilt of warring moralities - into something more stable.

But, more to the point perhaps is Edward Gibbon, who wrote, “All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.”

We live in a nation with a majority of occupants who do not believe in the truth of evolution. We currently have a candidate — Huckabee — who supports the creationist museum, which places dinosaurs living alongside humans. We are led by a man who believes that a god put him where he is today to war against the infidels. We are a nation in retrograde.

Nothing that happens today is going to change that.

By the way, the first quote is Obama’s. And just as a point of interest, political commentators in the United Kingdom are now calling Obama, “The Black Ronald Reagan.” (http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2007/Obama-Republican-Defecters6may07.htm)

– The Maui Curmudgeon, somehwere on the Valley Isle