It’s Not Quite Khmer Rouge Time in America -- Yet. But the Whole Book Burning Thing Brings Us One Step Closer.

STEPHEN PIZZO FOR BUZZFLASH

Book burning has come to America. Imagine that. I guess we should have seen it coming. Burning books they don’t like/understand is, after all, a short step away from refusing to believe the President’s birth certificate is real, or that he’s a Manchurian Muslim or that cutting taxes on the rich will make the poor wealthier. When you’re peddling industrial-strength nonsense like that, sooner or later you have to start burning materials that blow your cover. 

I don’t know when this slide into stupidity is going to slow, but right now all I see is it gaining momentum. I have a theory why, and it is not kind or politically correct. 

Dumb people; those who were born that way as well as those who just grew up that way, have spent their entire lives feeling -- let’s say, “unappreciated.” 

Then, all of a sudden one of their own, Glenn Beck, gets his own national TV show, writes selling books and is pulling in $32 million a year. (Of course he’s selling all those books to them and they are his entire audience, but never mind.) Glenn talks their kinda talk..simple, simplified, simple-minded. Instead of burning books, Beck burns inconvenient history -- recently when he told his flock they were not racists. How could they be since it was them -- not the evil NAACP, but them, hard-working, God-fearing white folk, who were really behind the 1960 civil rights movement.  

Beck, Limbaugh, O’Reilly and their ilk are, of course, the smartest animals in that particular barnyard, and are playing their peers for all their worth.. which in Beck’s case is thirty-two big ones a year. Tea Partiers flock to these Elmer Gantry-types like chickens eagerly coughing up bus fare for a ride to the nearest KFC.

But these Pied Pipers to Moronocracy have also given back. They have given the lower-common-denominator types the thrill of their lives. For the first time they are being taken seriously. Suddenly they are no longer being advised not to get involved in things they don’t understand or to listen rather than speaking or, when they did venture an opinion, that they just plain wrong. 

No, suddenly, virtually overnight, they are in demand. Even the folks they diss as the “lame-street media” are covering them, shoving TV cameras in the face, interviewing them, even quoting them. The same elected officials who wouldn’t have even returned their calls just two years ago, are now calling them for advice, endorsements or just to assure them they are “listening now.”

Whoa! What a rush. Stupidity empowered! No wonder they’re so energized. Now it’s the “elites” who on the run, being told to shut up and to stop spreading “lies.”

It’s not quite Khmer Rouge time in America -- yet. But the whole book burning thing brings us one step closer.
"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

Heinrich Heine, 1933