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NY Times columnist David Brooks waxes nostalgic about the serious cultural essays (and era) that once graced the pages of TIME and NEWSWEEK in the 1950’s and 60’s. He writes:

“If you read Time and Newsweek from the 1950’s and early 1960’s, you discover they were pitched at middle-class people across the country who aspired to have the same sorts of conversations as the New York and Boston elite.

The magazines would devote pages to the work of theologians like Abraham Joshua Heschel or Reinhold Niebuhr. They devoted as much space to opera as to movies because an educated person was expected to know something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually seeing one.”

I too remember that TIME magazine had a 1966 cover that asked, “IS GOD DEAD?”. Time was the newsweekly of serious political and international reporting, with paintings of statesmen like General DeGaulle, Chairman Mao, and President Kennedy. Before it became “Time-Warner” it was “Time,Inc.” It was run by chain smoking, martini drinking, Harvard educated WASPS. They lived in Darien and Westchester, summered in Nantucket, wore seersucker in the summer and grey flannel in the winter and rode the train into Grand Central.

Time today is a childish idiot media commercial driven by movie promotions, best selling junk authors, celebrities, and feel good soft stories about how to raise a genius kid or why Americans are getting smarter by reading less and playing more video games. It represents the shallowest and most frightening trend of our time: the total immersion in entertainment and electronics 24 hours a day. It lives to promote DVD’s, mobile phones, Donald Trump, NBC, drug advertising, automobiles. Yes, Virginia this is what America is all about. The onslaught of stupidity that is only driven by big bucks is what so deliniates the current era. ONLY profit matters.

What Mr. Brooks ignores is the role that Republicans have played in the lowering of our nation’s IQ. They are the first ones to want to cut funding for the arts, PBS TV and radio, public school music programs. Conservatives venerate religious idiocy. They think that Darwin is only a theory but angels and resurrection are real. The right wing panders to the most ignorant and reactionary voters in our nation who watch FOX NEWS with its rotating roster of screaming simpletons.

In all fairness to the right, the left has been equally as culpable in the ascension of ignorance. Affirmative action and bi-lingual programs along with p.c. ethnic and sexist educational biases have created a curriculum where race and sex are markers of importance. What a poet looks like, is equally as important as what she writes. The right and left are both prisoners of the current economic and philosophical fallacy that places open markets and free international labor and environmental exploitation as the highest values.

Listen to the eloquent and articulate Eisenhower or Kennedy, and compare these men to our current President who would not even qualify in intellect to a third rate used car salesman in rural Mississippi. He is the stuttering and illiterate man leading our nation, and indeed the world. How can we expect TIME Magazine to write thoughful and insightful articles to a public that reveres and twice elected a monkey brain laughingly called, “Leader of the Free World?”