James Clay Fuller

James Clay Fuller wrote a great blog entry on voter mentality. Here are a few samples:

Get out there and listen to those people, the American electorate. You'll find they believe that “all men are equal,” and don't grasp the fact that the equality the founders of this country aimed for was equality of opportunity. If you're a dummy, you are NOT equal to a knowledgeable, intellectually active person when it comes to discerning how best to govern this over-sized country.

It was not the illiterate stable hands nor even the barkeeps, good men though they may have been, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and led the Revolution against England.

That is an admission none of us are supposed to make, lest we be struck down as “elitists.” Strive to elect politicians who are smarter than the average loaf of bread and know more than the average 12-year-old and we become “Eastern elitists,” which is something as repulsive as dog droppings on the soles of one's shoes.

To some unknown degree, a majority of the American public walks blindly through life because we no longer have a functioning mass news system. We have a mass propaganda system, easily manipulated by the political right and inclined anyway to believe whatever the power elite tells them.

Need an example?

People who regularly read good Internet news sources such as TruthOut, know that the Republicans already have in place a massive system of vote suppression and election fraud which will function powerfully on Nov. 4. But ask your neighbors what they know of that.

You'll find that most of them “know” ACORN is a corrupt organization that has been busy registering fraudulent voters. They don't know that's been disproven time after time. They know nothing of the huge Republican vote suppression efforts in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado and other states, and they certainly don't know about the blatant fixing of voting machines to produce Republican election victories in some of those states.

CNN tried Thursday, Oct. 23, to report on vote suppression, but it so carefully, and falsely, “balanced” the reports that they gave the impression that the suppression techniques were necessary to stem massive voter fraud – which, in fact, is nonexistent except in swing states where the Republican Party has set up its scams.

The two Americas cannot cooperate in any meaningful way. The far right does not compromise, and it has filled its army of the ignorant with hate; it is like a horde of Genghis Khan's Mongols, intent on destroying all who impede conquest.

Wordsmart, a company that sells vocabulary-improvement home courses, says that from 1950 to the present, the useful vocabulary of the average American teenager dropped from 25,000 to 10,000 words. That's roughly a 60 percent decrease in the number words kids readily recognize and can use. It seems obvious: If you lack the words to describe, analyze, think with, you can't think critically to any real depth. At this rate, Americans will be reduced to “Me Tarzan, you Jane” by 2050.

Eric Fromm’s observation: “That millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make those people sane.”