Reply #44: Apropos the dumbing down you dismiss as "ridiculous":

[newswolf56]

I spend two weeks out of every month researching and writing reports to help our oldest, most impoverished and therefore most vulnerable citizens defend themselves against savage cutbacks in social services -- cutbacks selfishly imposed by our ever-more-ignorant and therefore ever more fascist electorate: voters so grotesquely benighted they cannot even grasp the basic fact they too will someday be elderly.

Since I covered social issues throughout my newspaper and magazine career -- even more deeply than I covered education issues (for which I actually won more awards) -- I know all too well how the methodical, 37-year destruction of the U.S. social safety net closely parallels the burgeoning ignorance of the citizenry.

It's tragic that journalists and teachers -- people who should be united in purposeful solidarity (and indeed are so united most everywhere else) -- are here in America almost always adversaries. It was not always so. It's revealing, too: yet another example of how the oligarchy maintains power by keeping us all at one another's throats.