With a lot of help from an out-dated electoral process, and a little push from those who would do us harm, the United States finds itself today being ruled by the unruly. George Orwell called them Proles and Hillary Clinton called them deplorables. Sarah Palin called them Soccer Mom and Jon McCain called them Joe the Plumber. In this issue of News by Nature, we call them Idiots. As blacks use “Nigger” in comradery and even respect, so NBN uses “Idiot.” At one time or another we’re all Idiots. NBN remembers fondly working construction jobs with fellow Idiots talking sports, laughing at off-color jokes and using the word “ain’t” a lot.
For Idiots, life is a daily discipline of applying skills learned over younger years to a fresh set of tasks, each loosely defined by the same parameters called a “job.” There’s innovation enough to make those jobs reasonably interesting, but never so much that it cuts too deep into productivity. In the Idiot’s world, there’s a time for learning and a time for doing your job and over time the former yields to the latter until age takes over and then someone younger, stronger and paid less takes over.
This occupational obedience earns Idiot World the respect of a job well done and the reliable measures of a life well lived: providing for a family, and buying stuff and having fun with both.These contentments free us from the anxieties of underachievement while occasionally letting us overindulge when we overachieve. When we over-indulge and under-achieve—when Joe the Plumber becomes Joe Six-Pac—society frowns, we pay our penance to higher authorities and, hopefully, return to work Monday with a clear conscience determined to do better.
Today science, technology, engineering and math are ending Idiot World. STEM is leveraging our daily production to where we continuously and vastly outpace our old jobs. STEM is confronting Idiot World with the ugly contemplation of just how important are these jobs generations before us dedicated their lives to. By contrast, just how important are we that software and robots now do our jobs more efficiently and affordably.
As STEM upends primal forces which have governed Idiot World since the Industrial Revolution, innovation is becoming the most sought-after skill set. That’s got Soccer Mom and Plumber Joe plenty frightened for their future. Frightened people are unruly people and as STEM busily transforms the world around them, we have a fake Idiot in the Whitehouse using the only levers left to keep real Idiots blissfully ignorant: the promise of plenty of pointless jobs and praise from higher authorities. In the Latest Post: The evils of STEM in a God-fearing, blue collar, Idiot World.
Idiot America Howard stern https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxyRBiJTa_k
An Ode to Idiots and the Middle Class
We are NBN and we are idiots. We’ve been sober-minded for 20 years. With apologies to the wonderful organization that turned these 14 words into a rason d’etra for two million recovering addicts, we nonetheless feel it fair to posit that idiocy is an addiction as blissful as any drink or drug. The word ignorant might be a better fit for the purposes of this post. But then, in this the information age, ignorance is idiotic. So, we’ll be going back and forth as we try to stitch together the blossoming relationship between the two and the nation’s Middle Class.
One can argue we are a nation of idiots as we all chose to ignore one or another wave in the deluge of information washing over the world each day. NBN choses to ignore Fox News and CNN. The issue we wish to parse in this issue of NBN is the relationship between ignorance and occupation and why we think rural America is Idiot America. If this sounds trite, arrogant, and condescending—and it is—someone needs to explain then, why rural regions of this country so overwhelmingly voted for Trump while the cities overwhelmingly support anybody but Trump. Here’s our explanation.
For the pro-Trump, anti-government conservatives this cold, cum civil war pits the self-reliance of laid-back country living with those of your kind, against the frenetic, decadent dependence on public resources enjoyed in polyglot urban America. Conversely, in a world of rapidly diminishing natural resources self-righteous, globally-minded progressives celebrate the efficiency and diversity of city life over the selfish, xenophobic, wastefulness of country living. Caught in the middle with a foot in both worlds—and the rest in the suburbs—is the nation’s Middle Class. Do they side with the urban Libtards or the rural Rethuglicans.
The Rethugicans have the decisive advantage here because the Middle Class is under STEM attack. That’s right, good, ol’ science, technology, engineering and math, the essential ingredients to this nation’s previous preeminence is poised to up-root, if not end altogether what once made America great: A world class consumer economy that the Middle Class built, enjoyed, and sustained since WWII. By contrast, STEM today offers the Middle Class at best a vastly different, undefined future. Soccer Mom and Joe the Plumber don’t do different. That’s why so many otherwise morally rooted, well-meaning Middle Class Americans supported a president who is anything but.
We’re not talking about the flag waving, boat sinking, crucifix-clutching Trump fanatics. We’re talking about the “silent majority”, now in the minority with a constitutionally provided electoral college edge, about to be locked in place by a Rethuglican Supreme Court coup. These people refuse to condemn this president for fear of leaving behind the standard of living that made America, at the very least, feel great. The Middle Class may well re-elect for a second term, history’s single most unqualified leader all for that tried and true mother’s milk of successful political campaigns: fear. Fear of immigrants taking their jobs. Fear of science shaking their faith. Most of all, that sum of all fears: the unknown. Deep-down the Middle Class knows that STEM is going to turn their world on its ear so they can only vote for the one guy who scoffs at the stuff.
Given a choice, do farmers really want software steering their tractors? What becomes of legions of farm workers when artificial intelligence starts picking the nation’s strawberries and apples? How do we occupy millions of masons, carpenters, sheet-rockers, spacklers, plumbers and tile-setters as homes are increasingly built by 3-D printers? Human truck drivers are soon to be an endangered species and we already know what happens to manufacturing assembly line workers in the age of robotics. Are we just going to sit by and watch these disruptive technologies turn the Middle Class into an anachronism? The real question, which neither side of the political spectrum dares to address is: Do we really have a choice?
The answer is: You can’t stop progress. Yet the fear of same has Middle Class America willing to embrace a president feverishly dismantling the organized labor movement which empowered it. Meanwhile a much greater threat, what the brilliant Michael Lewis called The Fifth Risk, is rushing forward even faster. The only platform this administration has ever run on is deconstructing an administrative state built largely to protect those who cannot possibly protect themselves against global unknowns like pandemics, climate change, and nuclear holocaust.
Trump’s “World’s Greatest Economy” unleashed the consumer economy from decades of these costly, poorly administered, and in many cases much-hated government protections. Buying “stuff” has once again become this country’s main measure of greatness. It also unleashed chaos in the administrative state with no consideration for the overwhelming majority of the freshly unemployed in Trump’s now Covid ravaged economy. What neither side of the political divide chooses to admit, as they promise to put these good folks back to work, is that Covid has thrust into warp-speed the STEM-driven disruptive technologies turning the US from a manufacturing economy into an information economy. More than half of the Middle Class jobs these folks wish to return to are going to be radically redefined regardless of who is in the Whitehouse.
That’s why a trite, arrogant, and condescending game show host still has so much appeal to a famously staid Middle Class. It has endured four-years of unparalleled political and social upheaval in the vain hope of bringing back the 1950s. Clutching to such hopes in an information economy demands some level of ignorance, and while Soccer Mom and Joe the Plumber are proving increasingly willing to oblige, the Middle Class ain’t stupid. It sees the writing on the wall. If the path of progress leads to a future where computers increasingly do their jobs, then making American great again has a certain, reassuring ring to it.
Which brings us to the final question of the day? What is great? Is it: hard work, raising a family, buying stuff, enjoying life, and then handing the planet off to the next generation with increasingly fewer alternatives but to do like-wise? Or do we follow STEM into a very uncertain future knowing only that the good ‘ol days will play an ever-shrinking role in that future. Given such choices, ignorance starts to sound pretty good, but then, where will that lead?
NBN left construction for a reason. Despite the reliable rewards, it’s hard work with little promise outside a paycheck. Still, constantly reinventing the world and ourselves in an effort to keep up, sounds even harder and with less reliable rewards. But with that paycheck comes a promise of a more efficient less wasteful tomorrow, and at NBN, we hate waste. Not just the waste of limited natural resources by consuming ever more of them as the only measure of a life well-lived. We hate wasting time, as we’ve already wasted so much of it. Worse, we hate wasting human potential on jobs designed to maximize productivity over potential. One thing is for sure: It’s up to us idiots.
The cultural divide between rural and urban America has NBN thinking of a deer hunting trip some 25 years ago. At the dinner table after a day of same my buddy’s high-school-aged son mentioned watching a lynx prancing around in the snow. “And you didn’t shoot it,” the father asked incredulously. As the son stammered, the conversation turned and the exchange was soon forgotten. The lesson clearly was not. The next time we saw father and son together it was with forearms draped over a pick-up truck bed. Scattered before us lay a dozen much maligned mallards, scant parts of which may have made it to a dinner table. More likely a landfill, after serving a six-month sentence in a basement freezer. Hunting and fishing animals you actually eat can be fun and rewarding. Fussing with all the fins, feathers, fur, gamey meat and freezer burn is not. Not when $6 ribeyes are on sale.
Which today begs the question: Why hunt at all when we throw out 40 percent of the food we create? In a word: tradition and a desperate lack thereof. America is the new kid on the block when it comes to world history. Our 200 to 400 years on this planet pale beside Europe’s 2,000 to 4,000. Commerce, capitalism, consumption and, most notably, their unfettered pursuit comprise much of what this young country is all about. Common threads, stitching together much older beliefs and behaviors imported the world over. American is a patchwork culture that unraveled once and, some argue, never really recovered.
Those ties are being sorely tested again. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are just the flotsam and jetsam of much more powerful undercurrents directing this country and the world into a very uncertain future. Science and technology are now threatening with inconsequence and obsolescence industries, economies and entire labor forces that defined for so many the American Dream. Who can blame tens of millions of angry old white guys and their women folk still living that dream, for grasping for the Good ‘ol Days. It sure beats watching your raison d’etre evaporate before your eyes. Such sentiments landing in the crosshairs of a commerce, capitalism and consumption culture is another issue.
Enter what NBN calls Lowest Common Denominator TV, or LCD TV. Programs like “Gold Rush,” “Most Dangerous Catch,” “Swamp People,” “Mountain Men” “Logger Men,” “Ice Road Truckers,” “Moonshiners.” Coalescing from these dark corners of cable TV is a shadow culture where making money any “old fashioned” way is the American Way. Handsome, twenty-year-olds denuding acres of pristine Alaskan wilderness for a half ounce of gold flakes isn’t profligate, it’s patriotic. Regularly risking your life crab fishing in Bering Sea snow storms or wrestling alligators in Louisiana swamps for $30,000 without benefits aren’t questionable career choices, it’s earning a living.
Mass media moguls making millions feeding the bottom of the consumer food chain a dead-end vision of America is bad, right? Not necessarily. What if, ultimately, LCD TV is turning these people the producers and profiteers intend for us to admire into items of curiosity? Entertaining icons of Americana, not anyone we’d actually want living next-door or visiting for the holidays. Consider programs like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” “Here come the Kardashians,” “Housewives of” –fill in-the-blank, “Teen and Pregnant,” “Long Island Medium,” and “Love & Hip Hop.” These modern-day portraits of domesticity are an more absurd efforts to breathe life into an even faster deflating Conservative American feminine mystique.
The phenomenon of Donald Trump makes clear this country still has its share of real-life Mama Junes and Phil Robertsons. Conservative Tea Party types who no doubt feel vindicated seeing themselves broadcast as lovable dolts embracing every form of ignorance the P.T. Barnum’s and Donald Trumps amass fortunes exploiting. Conservationists meanwhile can console themselves with the very real prospect that LCD TV might also be hastening the death spiral of our hillbilly heritage. Milking the whole land-of-the-free-and-home-of-the-brave thing works only as long as there are frontiers to plunder and Indians to kill.
As we rapidly run out of same it seems inevitable America will come to embrace our European heritage ever tighter. Hard work, humility and piety are what propelled the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock. Expanses of untouched natural resources gave greed and avarice a chance to leverage those virtues into an “American” standard of living envied the world over. Now, as the outlets for our industry evolve from dirt-under-the-nails to high-speed internet, a new reality is emerging. Consumer credos of working and wasting our lives away deliver increasingly diminishing returns as those once unlimited resources diminish. It’s a reality the rest of the world has a several-thousand-year jump on.
So perhaps we owe a debt of gratitude to LCD TV, Donald Trump and all those profiting by keeping our trash cans full. They are laying bare the absurdity of devoting our lives to winning or losing at the expense of how we play the game. Or, killing things for the simple pleasure, or primitive rush, of being able to do so. LCD TV’s ever-escalating antics attempting to elevate our consumer culture are destine to evolve from entertainment to embarrassment. It may take a little while, yet. Honey Boo Boos can be downright adorable when Momma Junes are not making us cringe on behalf of the whole of humanity. But eventually, inevitably NBN believes, they will leave us just with those traditions that instill in us pride, not profits.