Today I was noticing bumper stickers as I was driving home from work. One guy had the Darwin Fish being swallowed by the Truth Fish. (Actually they’re not completely swallowed; it looks more like the Darwin Fish is caught in the Truth Fish’s throat. Which makes sense, really; the Jesus Fish crowd does kind of choke on Darwin. But I digress.) Darwin Fish/Truth Fish indicates a creationist. Other stickers of note: “Before you were formed in the womb, I knew you. -God.” So that one’s an antiabortionist. I saw this one stuck on a sign: “9/11 Was An Inside Job.” Conspiracy theorist. “Never drive faster than your angels can fly.” Just plain stupid, that one. You see this kind of thing all around you in America, every day, and you sort of get inured to it. But for some reason today they stood out, and I found myself asking a simple question:
How does America continue to function when so many Americans are just plain crazy?
Not just crazy, either, but proudly crazy. Boldly and vocally crazy. Besides the obvious foolishness of christianity as Americans practice it, we have “birthers” who believe the president isn’t a citizen, scientologists, homeopaths, New Age bullshit, orbs and chakra and bible codes and holocaust deniers and moon landing deniers and all sorts of other nutball stuff. Astrology, for pete’s sake. I can’t believe that’s still with us. Somewhere out there I’m sure there are people who think the little slips of paper inside fortune cookies are real messages from some genuine cosmic oracle, or the Magic 8 Ball really does tell the future, and I’ll bet there’s a Church of Elvis, too. In any rational or reasonably civilized society, people holding these opinions and others like them would be objects of general hilarity; you’d be ashamed to show your face in public if people knew you believed in angels and demons. But in the USA, if you have an irrational belief, there’s a bumper sticker for it, so people who’ve never even met you can know you’re proudly nuts just by driving behind you.
How do we function? Seriously, how? We have a culture that not only tolerates irrational stupidity, it actually encourages it. We make a business out of it. Here we are, a decade into the 21st century now. Everyone has a cell phone and a computer and a car, and some of us have access to amazing lifesaving medical care, and we have a thousand other benefits of science and technology that simply didn’t exist a hundred years ago. Quite a lot of them didn’t exist even a generation ago. We live in this high-complexity world, surrounded by products of science and reason; and our culture is shaped around it, or by it; and yet huge chunks of our population are walking around with very little understanding of how it all works, because they don’t have the mental tools to grasp it. The spot in their brains where reason and logic should live is occupied instead by the same superstitions that have been holed up there for generations upon generations. You’d reasonably expect a high-tech society to be run by intelligent, thoughtful people; instead we have people who think god has a perfect plan for the universe but will put it aside for your benefit if you murmur a few words to the empty air.
People who can’t think (or won’t, which is nearly functionally equivalent in this context) would seem clearly unsuitable for the task of operating our society. And yet we muddle on, although I can’t see how we will manage to do so indefinitely. Our muddling latitude is almost over. I don’t know how much longer the rest of the world will put up with it, especially if the muddle-heads get in charge of the government again, which is looking increasingly likely. The “tea party” movement is basically a group of know-nothing reactionaries who wear their crass anti-intellectualism on the outside as if it were a medal or some sort of ghetto bling for Republicans. They don’t want to think; they want to be told what to think, by a book with onionskin pages, or a preacher reading it to them and telling them what they should believe it means, or some loutish loudmouth on television whose idea of winning a debate is to shout the other guy down for two and a half minutes. If this crowd gets back in the driver’s seat, well, it’s like letting the dog drive the car. Just because he can put his paws on the wheel doesn’t mean he can steer.
We often sneer at the muslim world because they are stuck in the 9th century ideawise. Well, so are we. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us. We think we’re superior because we have a higher standard of living and are surrounded by tech toys and the benefits of affluence, but that won’t last long. If we’re going to live our lives by 9th-century philosophies and refuse to take on the responsibility of living in the modern world, then we won’t have the modern world much longer; we’ll join Afghanistan in the 9th century soon enough. Autopilot will only take us so far; eventually someone’s got to be at the controls.
And overtly crazy people are just not qualified.






If it’s too loud, I’m too old
The other night I was out driving and wound up behind a ramshackle old Saturn bearing a bumper sticker for a local tattoo shop and another that stated “If it’s too loud, you’re too old.” Eventually I found myself beside this car at an intersection; the driver was a young guy, ragged like his car, and true to the sticker, the music coming from the car was indeed too loud. Not so bothersome as to rock my car on its springs, like some of those “bass cars” can, but loud enough for me to hear it clearly through closed windows and imagine with a slight shudder what it would be like to be his passenger.
“If it’s too loud, you’re too old.” I’ve seen this sentiment expressed before, a thumb of the nose by youth to their elders. I know it’s aimed at me. It doesn’t bother me all that much, because I have it coming; when I was this kid’s age, driving a car like that, I inflicted my stereo on those around me too, and for much the same reason. It’s like marking territory, I guess; sort of a broadcast audio swagger. It’s the kind of thing young guys do when they haven’t learned the difference yet between confidence and cockiness.
So I remember when I was that kid, and I don’t begrudge him his day. Enjoy them while you can, kid. Before you know it you’ll be in your 30s, and one day you’ll find you’ve made a habit of turning it down rather than up, and you’ll realize with a shock that you now know from experience what your parents meant when they said, “I can’t hear myself think.” And maybe you’ll think of that bumper sticker on that long-gone jalopy, and realize that you are now “too old,” by your very own definition, and maybe you’ll even think that you were kind of a jerk about it at the time. But don’t worry, we forgive you. So the best you’ll be able to do is go out and show a little forbearance to the younger guys who are doing the same thing. Because you deserve what you get, same as I deserve it today.
And time is not on your side.