A day or so ago, I responded to a post by Robert Reich about the phenomena of Donald Drumpf followers who seem to have some sort of dissociative disorder when it came to seeing things as they really are in favor of the drumbeat of “Make America Great Again”.  I seem to have struck a nerve, and one of the readers pointed out what she really liked in my post which is this paragraph:

Seriously, I think a lot has to do with the deterioration of educational quality in teaching critical and nuanced thinking, the rise of money-driven media that cares nothing about truth, and fanatical religious preaching that is tinged, oddly enough, with views of Armageddon while in the next breath teaches people that God loves rich people. I suppose it also has a lot to do with individualism on steroids, that being islands to ourselves and acting like entitled two year olds in public is something to be proud of as opposed to caring about others. Every society has its outliers, like the Dutch right winger and Anders Breivik in Norway, however other countries don’t hold them up as examples to follow as a general rule. Europe has suffered a great deal at the hands of mavericks who would tear society apart for power and mostly have learned the lessons.

My words are really from my understanding from Susan Jacoby’s book, The Age of American Unreason, which I read several years ago.  I learned about the book while watching Bill Moyer’s interview with Jacoby which you can see here.  I learned from this conversation between these two people how the idea of the President as Commander-in-Chief has become ubiquitous in viewing the Presidency, and how it “militarizes” the leader of this nation, as though that person is just the über general of us all.  Sounds like a small country dictator who rules with absolute power over impoverished and poorly educated people.  Does that sound good?  I don’t think so and I see why Jacoby hates it.  I’ve grown to hate it too.

There is so much to be plumbed from Jacoby’s book that I would highly recommend it to be read, especially in this election year, eight years after it first appeared on the scene–just prior to another election when America rejected dumb (Sarah Palin) and her knight-errant, John McCain, for a fresh new look to the Presidency.

If I had had my way, this year’s presidential candidates would each have to undergo a 2 hour one-on-one interview with Bill Moyers in place of the ridiculous series of “pseudo-debates” that have occurred.  He would have separated the fools from the worthy contenders in short order.  But like a tree falling in a forest, would anyone have heard it?