No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Arizona Conservative Idiot of the Week: the Arizona state legislature

Or at least those powerful Republican members who shot down a bill to create "International Baccalaureate" schools in Arizona, a program which has been highly successful in other states - until sabotaged by local fundy extremists.

The program, which would have been heavily subsidized by businesses and universities at a relatively minimal cost to the state, would allow children to learn a second language in kindergarten and would have focused on teaching about other countries and cultures in order to graduate students who can compete with their far better-educated counterparts from abroad. University and corporate leaders agree there is a crying need for such programs if the United States is to stay competitive in the global economy.

But the rethugs don't care; such programs are evil and Satanic, and "part of a slippery slope to a U.N. takeover and the end of U.S. sovereignty." Why? Because they expose children to the existence of a big wide world out there, instead of mindlessly inculcating "Americanism" and "United States heroes", and teaching children that America is the only country in the world with the One True System of Government (TM), and the only one where they are free to bear arms and worship Jeezus - two activities that go hand in hand, apparently.

I'm constantly astounded, not only by the ignorance of the religious lunatic extreme right, but their pride in their ignorance. They wallow in nativism, know-nothingism, and self-imposed blindness and backwardness. Gawd forbid that our kids should know anything about the world in which they will have to compete for a living! If it ain't in the Holey Buybull or the Book of Mor(m)on, you don't need to know it, so shut up and keep flipping burgers.

Of course, this anti-knowledge force field with which fundies surround themselves is part of the arsenal of defenses that makes American-style hard-right fundyism such a pernicious and virulent meme. By encasing its victims in an impenetrable cocoon of self-righteous ignorance, it guarantees that they are never exposed to any facts that might disturb their blinkered, rigid, unthinking world view and cause them to question their assumptions. Thus the meme ensures its continued survival and propagation.

If ignorance is bliss, those 'thugs in the state capital are in friggin' Nirvana.