1.
The American living room, for all its tasteful, hi-tech decor, is sometimes difficult to inhabit because of the several 800-pound gorillas lurking about that everyone pretends aren’t there so we don’t have talk about them or about how they mess up our lives and figure out what to do.

Even when we begin facing up to reality, problems ensue.

For example, at the very moment when Lyndon Johnson was signing the Civil Rights Act in 1965, he presciently remarked that he knew he was signing away the South for the Democratic Party.

Do tell.

The coded, successful racism of every Republican campaign since then and the solidification of the South as a Republican bastion show how right Johnson was.

The interesting question is: Why should this have been so? Why was there no majority of Southern whites who, like Johnson (himself a product of that culture), came to see the simple, urgent rightness of the Civil Rights Act?

That of course is not what happened.

What happened was a massive, almost monolithic move in the South to the far right, an unthinking, irrational, knee-jerk reaction to what was perceived as a threat to a treasured (if exploitative) way of life, bolstered by religious panderings of the most outrageous and simplistic sort.

Fear, though no one would admit as much, was the really big gorilla still in the Southern room.

Still, over the decades, the idea—and ideals—of racial equality have slowly more or less become an accepted part of the political spectrum. Rearguard actions (quotas, affirmative action) still occur but overt racist sentiment has been removed to the remotest kook-fringe.

And some gorillas such as sexism and homophobia we are slowly, slowly, sort of coming to terms with.

Others remain almost completely invisible.

The class gorilla, for one. Traditional and non-traditional people of the left have long and assiduously worked at bringing this massive beast to our attention. However correct their arguments—and they are perceptive and persuasive, it’s hard to get the populace excited when your sub-minimum-wage worker gets "free" credit cards in the mail, can buy a car worth four or five times his or her annual income, and thinks freedom of opportunity means the ability to buy a lottery ticket every week.

But there’s one gorilla that nobody’s talking about: the intelligence gorilla…

2.
The simple truth is that George W. Bush is not very smart. Take his words and deeds together and you’re hard put to avoid a judgment of "borderline idiot."

I’m not here to prove that that is so but to try to understand why and how, if it is so, large numbers of voters are enamored of him and his government.

We can divide voters into two groups:

   1. Those who think George W. Bush is stupid, and
   2. Those who don’t think he’s stupid.

Those who think he is stupid can in turn be divided into two sub-groups:

   1a. Those who think he is stupid but it doesn’t matter.
   1b. Those who think he is stupid and it matters a great deal.

Those who think he is stupid and who think it matters account for the blue states. It is inconceivable to people with this perception that such a person could, or should, be president.

What then of those who think he is stupid but believe it’s O.K.?

Here we run directly into that other 800-pound gorilla.

The stupid we have always had with us (and perhaps always shall), but never before have so many stupid persons had so much money, so many means of communication, and so many opportunities to hire smart people to remake the world into a place more comfortable for stupid people.

Culture—its creation as well as its preservation and transmission from one generation to the next—has always been the work of what someone long ago called "the passionate few."

The passionate few: the very small percentage of the population who create and who tend to that which is created.

As the blood bath of the 20th century spread, culture reflected the chaotic violence. Art—the arts—became brutal, full of unflinching views of what happened and what was yet to happen. By the turn of the millennium, of the parts of the ancient esthetic triumvirate—the good, the true, and the beautiful—only one was left standing: The creators, against daunting odds, had told the truth to humanity, saying, "This is what we are." It wasn't pretty.

The stupid, without the wherewithal to discriminate thoughtfully, blamed this terrible message on the messengers: profligate, obscene, ugly, arrogant artists foisting profligate, obscene, ugly, arrogant art onto the world.

It was a rough century, and by the end the anger and frustration—as well as the inability to see violent human reality for what it was—among the stupid was at a high, dangerous level.

Events and expedient servants of the rich conspired to put a spoiled—stupid—son of privilege in control as the new century dawned.

Hallelujah! thought the stupid. Things are not as bad as we thought. There is hope. We can regain that simpler, purer America of the good, the true, and the beautiful: one nation, under God.

They listened to his stuttering, halting speeches, and found him incredibly, powerfully ingratiating: He’s one of us!

Larded into the unvarnished jingoism were the coded—often only half-coded—references to Christianity: Not merely under God but under OUR one true Christian God.

Add in a willingness, upon encountering a dangerous belligerent drunk on the street, to take the fight all the way into the drunk’s house—we’ll show those mother-fuckers a thing or two, and the appeal to the stupid is enormously seductive and powerful.

3.
Culture is at the same time a delicate and an amazingly hardy flower. Tyrants fairly easily stamp it out or remake it for their own propagandistic ends, yet somehow the seeds survive to germinate again when the climate is more favorable. (Think about it: isn’t it astonishing, for example, that the handful of fragile manuscripts containing Plato and the Greek dramatists SURVIVED across centuries of the most brutal warfare?)

By culture I mean not merely its products but also the ways of thinking, feeling, and being necessary for its cultivation. Apparently such thriving requires some level of wealth, some years of peace, and some numbers of like-minded people (the passionate few, again).

Those conditions prevail only in cities. Across the world, in the vast countryside, other concerns are paramount. There, in the short-term, most rural persons think their interests coincide with those of the rich and powerful who assure them that they will shoulder the burden of protecting them (though of course their sons and daughters may occasionally be called on to may the supreme sacrifice).

Alarmed by what they perceive as the arrogant obscenity of the smart and their fellow travelers that smarty-pants arts crowd, such persons flock to what they perceive as the simple security of brute strength. The solace of the land may be theirs, but apart from the Holy Book, its related images and music, they can find nothing of value in the vast panoply of culture and its artifacts, certainly not in the shocking products of the last century. The only surprise is that they don’t vote in even larger numbers for well-marketed borderline idiots.

Change comes, the field is deeply plowed, only when, after time passes, economic hardship, and a certain number of deaths make clear even to those in need of simple solutions that no, no, the expedient interests of the rich and powerful are not congruent with their own.