"Divided" -- and Whether You Are a Gloriously Dumb-Fuck All-American Part of It

The man presently holding the office of President in this country is a criminal asshole, but not merely. He is so far toward the extreme end of any scale of assholery that he legitimately over-assholes any assholes I've ever met personally in my life, which is saying a good deal. Everyone over 30 must have a similar range of experience, asshole-wise. We've all been there; this isn't opinion, this classification along a spectrum of assholery, it's an unarguable fact that demonstrates itself anew every single day. We smell our shit everyday, so we know for a solid truth that shit stinks. No excuses will matter.

Still, it is one of our present-day ironies that we live at the very same time in a day when our national fate is tied to this clueless, spiteful douchebag, and in a time when our media culture requires news outlets of any vintage or format to have, at the very least, something punchy and insightful to offer up every hour, all day long, every day. When we could genuinely use much less news about the venal idiot running the government, we're saddled with so much more, every day.

This particular irony has its own ideological radioactivity – if we hear the same kind of desperate rationales and decipherings (of what cannot be rationalized or deciphered, generally) at that frequency, we will tend to believe it, or at least stop trying to apply our own reason to a sociopolitical situation that defies critical analysis.

The case in point I'm aiming at is the marching drumbeat, heard hundreds of times a day in American media, that by way of trying to explain how in hell this sociopathic goldbricker ever got into public office, we've come to the universal understanding that our nation, its population of 326 million, is "divided." "More divided" than ever. So divided. Lost in dividedness. Need to have more conversations, to bridge the divideness and come together. Should shun things, like that guy, and Fox News and Hillary and immigration, that are "divisive." Strong opinions are "divisive," so it's better to not complain about our moral bankruptcy or sheer lack of brain power and instead blame it on our being "divided." Which lets everyone, even the neo-Nazis and border-flocking assault-rifle menaces, off the hook.

Thoughts of the 2020 election season do not warm the heart. First of all, the Electoral College map of our 50%-50% hair-splitting dividedness is a myth – since less than 59% of American voters bothered to vote in the 2016 election, and that guy garnered far less than half of that, we can reasonably deduce that his elected presence, however it vexes our sense of rightness in the universe, does not signify that 50% of the country or anything close to it is among his "base." The number at its most generous estimation tops off at less than a quarter of American voters, and is probably far less than that. This mysterious "base" just gets lots of news coverage, that's all, probably because it does seem like an inexplicable species of invasive fungus, while the majority of us scratch our heads, go to work, and try to remember when the malfeasances of our government was an open secret obscured by semi-expert spin. Those were the days, we can't help but think.

But still, "divided"? Stop saying it. In truth, we've always been divided; it's an existential American reality, and always has been, and is probably a truism for most developed cultures as well. Free societies are defined by the presence of dissent, disagreement and discord. Only dystopias have a chance at being "undivided." Clearly, it doesn't explain anything, and claiming "more than ever" is simply ignorant of social history on the ground going back at least a century and a half.

So, if we're not "divided," what are we? How to explain that a substantial portion, if hardly a majority, of Americans form a "base" in support of professional liars, book-cookers, bribers, and naked amateur autocrats with a 5th-grade vocabulary? The economy isn't doing so badly, and the influence of Southern immigration has actually been mostly a boon in every measurable way. What could it be?

Far more than "divided," it seems clear to me, we are dumb. Dim-witted and gullible as baby ducks. Or, at least, that "base" portion of us – which though a minority may be enough to fuck us all up. Maybe it's more. It's not as if we haven't been warned – American schoolkids routinely perform on average below most developed countries, and have for decades. From kids come grown-ups, and you can't be surprised to find that we flunked out with a hard C, below average, in a 2013 international survey of about 166,000 people, ages 16 to 65 in more than 20 countries and subnational regions, tested by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (which is made up of mostly industrialized member countries). No arguing it: too many Americans gifted with the privilege of voting have the education and analytic capabilities of docked fish.

If you take out the urban areas, which of course support the rest of the country by any economic yardstick, you're left with a vast outland where adults, morbidly obese and otherwise committed to their own destruction, couldn't find their own state capitol on a map, or perform rudimentary math. If they'd graduated high school at some point, it was because their high schools were only fit for circus bears. This is what "divides" us – or allows wild extremities of tribal belief and "low-information voting" to rock the already corrupt system, and let the orphan-muggers of the GOP (and elsewhere) figure out new and fresher ways to scam us all like revival tent snake-oil suckers.

They're the evil sonsabitches doing it, in broad daylight. But they're able because we're too stupid to even know we're being fucked. And by "we," I mean not me, I mean the "base," those drooling losers, or maybe you.