[dreadgeek]

Earlier today I posted about an anecdote in Susan Jacoby's book "The Age of American Unreason" regarding FDR and one of his fireside chats. I got one or two facts wrong and Jacoby's telling is far more poignant than my writing skills can convey. So here it is, if you sit and think about this, really think about it, you'll start to see what we've lost and how we've let our country--that is to say ourselves--down.

Roosevelt's first fireside chat after Pearl Harbor came in February 1942, and he had asked Americans to spread out a map during his radio address so that they could follow and comprehend the geography of battle. The New York Times quoted one E. O. Schmidt, sales manager of a Manhattan bookstore, about the public response to the president's request. Schmidt had rounded up 2,000 copies of a new atlas to meet the demand, and, by the the night of the fireside chat, every map had been sold. Roosevelt told his listeners--who included 80 percent of all American adults--that he had asked them to use maps so that they might better understand a war being waged, unlike previous wars, on "every continent, every island, every sea, every airline in the world." In explaining the strategic situation to the public, Roosevelt was able to draw on his own extensive knowledge of geography, acquired early in life through his well-known hobby of stamp collecting. He had told his speechwriters that he was certain if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies must travel to the armed forces, "if they understand the problem and what we are driving at, I am sure they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but of different Americans, without access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but with a much greater receptivity to learning than today's public.
(Susan Jacoby--The Age of American Unreason)

But it's more poignant even than that. In 1940, only about a quarter of all American men and women had even graduated high school. The numbers for college graduates were both under 10%. That means that around 70% of all Americans had less than a high school diploma and still they behaved like this. We're not talking a population of intellectuals. Now, the overwhelming majority of Americans graduate high school and about a third of all Americans have a college degree. And yet, more than half of us couldn't tell you which coast of the continent borders the Pacific ocean and which borders the Atlantic. A nation of people who hadn't graduated high school thought it important to know where Germany, Japan and Italy were. A nation of high school graduates could care less to know and would look down their nose and call elitist--or worse--any person who did care to know.

That's what we've lost. I was raised by people who grew up in that America, who remembered what it was like. They taught me that as a black woman in America it was my *job* to be informed and to think deeply on the issues of the day, if for no better reason than so I could vote well and explain things to my children. I don't want America to turn into a bunch of policy wonks (okay, I wouldn't shed any tears if we did but I don't expect it to happen). I would like for America to get whatever it was we had in 1942 that we don't have now back. If we can't get it back (and who knows if we can but I doubt it) then at least let us know what it is we let go.

Those Americans--who did not protect the voting rights of blacks in all the states and the women in the population had only been voting for two decades--demanded a president who solved problems and talked to them like they were grown ups. They demanded it and they got it because they *deserved* it and would settle for nothing less. We want a president who--I don't even know if WE know what we want but whatever it is, talking to us like we're grown ups and assuming that we could take bad news certainly aren't high on the list of they are present at all. They got the government they deserved in 1942. We have, I suspect, the government that we deserve--not the one we need--in 2010.

Cheers
Aj


Cheers
Aj