Arab News
Jamal Dounani
The forum showcasing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump held at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan last Wednesday was meant to be a dry run for their highly anticipated debates later this month, formally set to begin Sept. 26.
Here’s the former secretary of state assuring the millions of viewers who watched that, if elected president, she would be a forceful commander-in-chief who would not be “putting ground troops into Iraq, and not putting them in Syria,” while Trump, well, as is his wont, he showed his Houdini-like skill at squirming out of answers.
But for my money, it was the Third Party candidate, Libertarian Gary Johnson, who showed us how America, self-styled leader of the free world, is so uninformed about the world it putatively leads; how its citizens, flaunt their ignorance and its leaders their shallowness – proof positive of H.L. Mencken’s observation, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” and the credibility of the thesis found in Richard Hoftstadler’s iconic, Pulitzer winning 1964 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, who wants to be president of the United States, was interviewed by MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Mike Barnicle on Thursday.
“If elected president,” Barnicle asked, “what would you do about Aleppo?”
“About?” asked a befuddled Johnson.
“Aleppo.”
“What is Aleppo?” Johnson innocently inquired.
Barnicle equally innocently asked the presidential candidate if he was kidding and when the answer came ‘no,’ the host, in an effort at edification, then explained: “Aleppo is in Syria, it’s the epicenter of the refugee crisis.”
Yes, Aleppo, the flash point of Syria’s five-year war. Aleppo the besieged city with 300,000 souls trapped in it, with little access to food, water and medicine. Aleppo which has commanded headline for months.
“Oh, got it, got it,” Johnson shot back.
“The refugee crisis is the result of regime change that we end up supporting, and inevitably these regimes have led to a less safer world.”
Later, knowing that he had been wrong-footed, he told Bloomberg News: “I have to get smarter, and that’s part of the process.” Needless to say, social media savaged him. “I’d always considered Aleppo was the truly under-appreciated Marx brother,” said one posting. Another said: “Maybe he was just playing Jeopardy and giving the answer in the form of a question.” Jill Stein, the other one of the two Third Party candidates, had a warrant issued out for her arrest on Wednesday by a North Dakota county for spray-painting slogans on construction equipment during a protest by members of her Green Party against the Dakota Access pipeline, and charged with several misdemeanor counts of “criminal trespass and criminal mischief.”
So much for Third Party presidential candidates making a difference in an election pitting two major party nominees considered the most unpopular in US history, with both distrusted by large sections of the electorate. And that’s why voters – 10 percent in recent polls – have said they would choose a Third Party candidate in November.
Beyond the ignorance that political leaders betray about international affairs is their tenuous grasp of the English language. Consider the recently deceased Marion Barry, mayor of Washington, and what he had to say several years ago about crime in the nation’s capital. “Outside of the killings,” he told reporters proudly, “DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.” And consider equally what former President George W. Bush thought of America’s enemies. “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” he said. “They never stop thinking to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
Political astuteness, or lack thereof? Here’s President Ronald Reagan telling reporters about his official visit to South America in 1982: “Well, I learned a lot. I went to Latin America to find out from them and learn their views. You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.” And Vice President Cheney shot back “So?” after a reporter cited a recent poll showing that most Americans did not believe the Iraq war was worth fighting for. And on and on it goes.
And ordinary Americans? Forget about it. The phenomenon of ill-informed Americans is not confined to Trump supporters. A 2004 Zogby poll, for example, found that only 42 percent of Americans could name the three branches of government. The peril of ignorance, of course, lies in the fact that your government launches pointless, unnecessary wars in the Middle East and beyond (remember Vietnam?) without you knowing why your country, and your kids, are there to fight them. Look at it this way, during the Cold War in 1964, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, only 38 percent of Americans knew that the Soviet Union was not a member of Nato. And Dana Perino, who was White House Press Secretary during George Bush’s last two years in office, by her own admission later on NPR Radio, had not even heard of the momentous event that brought the world that much closer to a nuclear apocalypse.
Sean Illing, a contributor to Salon, recently wrote on the publication’s website: “I hate to say it, but the conclusion stares us in the face: We’re a stupid country, full of loud, illiterate and credulous people. Trump has marched straight to the nomination without offering anything like a platform or a plan. With a vocabulary of roughly a dozen words, wall, Mexicans, Muslims …he has bamboozled millions of Americans …And the people are getting what they want, and what they want is to have their idiocies and their discontent beamed back at them.”
It’s chic to be ignorant in America. And what other country in the world, pray tell, boasts of having had a million-member strong political party, active in the 1850s, called, with a straight face, the Know Nothing Party?
