Three Clods and a Country

In Washington DC, there gathered on this Saturday, the 28th of August,2010, a crowd of useful idiots. It was a multiracial, bipartisan affair, that saw two separate groups of true believers cry their hosannas whilst the Chosen One's preached their homilies.

These maddening crowds were lead by two of the preeminent demagogues of our age--the Rev. Al Sharpton and Glenn Beck--who each extolled the virtues of generations past and issued commands to their parishioners to "take back the country".

Such delightfully absurd human beings deserve a third member to fill out this unholy Trinity and we find that in the sometimes funny Jon Stewart, who while not in DC in person was there in spirit. The Spirit of Smarm aligned himself with the good Reverend by tearing into the apostate Beck on his television program, The Daily Show.

This representative assembly of America's bigoted, arrogant, and sanctimonious side on this glorious late summer day, is reminder enough of how many stupid people breath air each day.

For how can any intelligent person in full grasp of their mental faculties, follow such obviously narrow minded, obtuse people as Sharpton, Beck, and Stewart?How can anyone take seriously a Reverend, a TV personality, and a Comedian, on political issues?Not one member of this ignoble triumvirate has ever held office or been in a position to make decisions for large, diverse collection of human beings.

People ask why the news reports the barks of these dogs--I asked that myself today--and the answer is simple: people place great stock in what these men say.For whatever reason, they have been awarded credibility by large swaths of the American body politic.

That these are men of little intellectual power, there is no doubt. That these are men who will be mere footnotes in the history of the times, there is also no doubt.But their loud barking attracts hordes of lemmings wanting to be lead by people who share their parochial beliefs.Independent thought and thorough analysis are wasted on people already convinced that what they know is the truth. There is no possibility of doubt or an alteration of their view point.

If there is an excuse for this mindset, it is that we are all to an extent prisoners of our experiences. Everything we believe is filtered through the lens of our life. We have come to our beliefs by acquiring information through direct contact or taught to us by a secondary source.

A person who possesses a (relatively, for there are no minds free of prejudice)free mind will fight the mind's tendency to refer to the mental default we call prejudice and analyze a subject critically. Such people are rare in number in this world. Most human beings are guided by their preconceived notions when they think about a topic.

Demagogues like Sharpton and Beck know this, so they tailor their speeches to appeal to the prejudices of the people who listen to them. They feed off the paranoia, bigotry, and distrust of the crowds they are preaching to.Truth, justice, and tolerance are of little interest to men who made their careers and fortunes off of playing to the worst of our nature.

It is a sad irony that so near the statue of the Great Emancipator stood two men who represent a perversion of the ideals that Abraham Lincoln defended.

Lincoln sought unity among Americans, these men create division. He sought empathy and understanding, they sew intolerance and animus. He strove to reconnect a divided house, they are striving to partition it into several parts.

History has shown that our house can withstand such division if it is lead by men of exceptional ability. There has as of yet, been any sign that the United States has such leaders today.