"We are becoming the stupid giant of planet Earth"

From Leonard Pitts of Miami Heard (in an OpEd piece on September 21, 2008) -

I'm reminded of how someone challenged me the other day on my contention that anti-intellectualism has overtaken this land. I mentioned by way of example Palin's Bible literalism, but really, there's so much more. There's the ''Jay Walking'' segment on Leno. There's this notion that ''elite'' is a four-letter word. There's the White House's censorship and politicization of science. There's the recent survey which found that more people can name all five Simpsons than all five freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment.

And there's this: as many as 50,000 incidents* since 1990 in which a book was forced to justify its existence. We're talking books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, books like The Color Purple, books like Harry Potter and, yes, books like Daddy's Roommate, books that offended because they expressed ideas that made someone uncomfortable. As if any other kind of idea was worth expressing.

We are becoming the stupid giant of planet Earth: richer than Midas, mightier than Thor, dumber than rocks. Which makes us a danger to the planet -- and to ourselves. This country cannot continue to prosper and to embrace stupidity. The two are fundamentally incompatible.

(* An incident in this context is a request to a librarian to ban a book.)

He says it so well. We do need to wake up, and pay attention. This dumbing down is happening at many levels. The media has a big role to play in this, so does the Government, and the Industry. In short, there is enough blame to go all around.