The Sillywalkers

Neddie Jingo on Little Stupid and Big Stupid:

[W]hen fresh evidence of the man's appalling intellectual shortcomings comes to light, a kind of conflict is set up in the head. You remember how comedic ridicule of his casual inarticulacy serves to call attention away from the frank evil that he commits: In many minds, the Little Stupid of "I'm the Decider" serves to overshadow the Big Stupid of the occupation of Iraq. It's when Big Stupid and Little Stupid declare themselves simultaneously that it becomes horrifyingly clear just how deep is the shit we're in.

And oh, the excruciating irony that the reasons we’ve been plunged into such an execrable mess have also been the fertile ground of Bush’s success. The obstinate dumbness (Little Stupid) that reveals itself in Bush’s mush-mouthed mispronunciations and malapropisms, his garbled bumbling and contemptible foolishness, are the basis of his aw-shucks persona that appeal so keenly to hoi polloi who view the educated—and education itself—as hostile, actively seeking to expose them as the rubes they claim to be proud to be. It is, after all, the great unacknowledged truth of those who are ill-informed and uneducated that they hate being that way, that they are embarrassed of their intellectual station and fear being revealed.

A generation or two ago, working class mothers and fathers spoke openly about their lack of education, imparting to their children and grandchildren the importance of school and the currency of knowledge, often using their own circumstances as the threat of what could happen without it. My grandmother, who was a wise and intelligent and incredibly well-read woman, who worked outside the home long before the term “working mother” was even part of the lexicon, used to tell me how I needed to be “smarter” than she; I needed to go to college. I’ve friends with immigrant parents who say the same, in the same urgent tones, to their children—but among long-time white American families (the Bush base), people like my grandmother don’t exist anymore, people who saw formal education as the key to success, even as they spent their lives self-educating and never acknowledging its virtue to themselves.

Instead, the Bush base resents the promise of formal education and eschews the merits of self-education, masking their own lack of knowledge behind a false pride in simplemindedness, as if consciously remaining obstinately dumb is its own justification. They are conveniently supported by a particular incarnation of modern Christianity, which demonizes education and reassures them that the “gut-think” they esteem is rooted in faith. (Another difference here: My grandmother lived at a time when the church was a primary educator for the working classes.)

Should an inopportune slice of reality threaten to undermine their fragile imprudence, or their counterfeit pride of it, they have a rather shocking capacity to succumb to willful ignorance (Big Stupid), deliberately remaining intent on their poorly conceived convictions in spite of all evidence to the contrary. That Bush ignores “reality,” as he is so often accused of doing, is not a shortcoming in their estimation, but an admirable attribute. He stays the course, determinedly asserting his rightness, which makes it so. As long as you never have to admit you’re wrong, you can always claim that you’re right.

The aversion to admitting error seems inexplicable, but it is rooted in the abovementioned fear of exposure as unintelligent. A person who values knowledge admits a mistake with less worry, because everyone makes mistakes even in the best of circumstances, but the Bush base worries that they will be seen as too stupid to have known better in the first place. Perhaps, they worry, the reason I was wrong is because I am dumb. It’s a thought they don’t like, and so they try to avoid it at all costs.

Exemplifying these attributes has made Bush their perfect leader. Indeed, he is both Little Leader and Big Leader. Little Leader validates them by being just like them. Big Leader allows them, by virtue of such goofy dimness subverting the image of a classic authoritarian, to deny being authoritarian cultists who actively support the diminishment of our nation. It’s ever so much easier to ignore the dangers of supporting a tyrant to assuage your own fears when you’re not expected to goosestep, but sillywalk.