Anyone who has paid serious attention to the disaster that
has befallen Iraq knows that Ferris is either patently dishonest or
willfully ignorant when he touts the situation there as "the central
front in the campaign for hope." "Campaign for hope?" Even a majority
of military families now believe that the invasion of Iraq was a
mistake. What possible outcome could justify the horrors and evil of
Bush's war?
"Campaign for hope?" Consider that, according to Robert Dreyfuss and
Tom Engelhardt, "There are, by now, perhaps a million dead Iraqis, give
or take a few hundred thousand. If a typical wounded-to-dead ratio of
3:1 holds, then you're talking about up to 4 million war, occupation,
and civil-war casualties. Now, add in the estimated 2-2.5 million who
went into exile, fleeing the country, and another estimated 2.3 million
who have had to leave their homes and go into internal exile as Iraqi
communities hand neighborhoods were 'cleansed.'"
"Campaign for hope?" Consider how often events in Iraq have compelled
President Bush to ratchet down his criteria for success there:
Repeatedly! Mr. Ferris, I sincerely "hope" that neither you nor your
family is ever situated in such a "central front in the campaign for
hope."
Unfortunately, Kevin Ferris doesn't have a lock on the rank stupidity infecting right-wingers at the
Inquirer.
Simply consider Michael Smerconish's latest piece on immigration, "What
we lose now that newcomers don't assimilate." Like Ferris, Mr.
Smerconish has no qualms about spouting nonsense about subjects he
knows nothing about.
Take his reliance on "the often cited
image of the United States as a melting pot." Assuming the "melting
pot" to be a fact, Smerconish then criticizes America's Hispanic
immigrants for "not assimilating the way my [his] forefathers did when
they arrived." Predictably, Smerconish's "Head Strong" column is wrong
on both counts.
Consider the opposite conclusions reached by an expert on immigration, Roger Daniels. Writing in his book,
Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, Daniels quotes a prominent 1963 study by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (
Beyond the Melting Pot) to assert the melting pot "simply did not happen."
Worse, according to Daniels, "Not only have ethnic groups and, even
more important, awareness of ethnicity, persisted, but in the United
States and Canada (as opposed to Latin America) relatively little
amalgamation has taken place." [p. 18] In a word, the melting pot is a
"myth." Thus, Smerconish's criticism of Hispanics reeks of know-nothing
nativism. Like Ferris, Smerconish writes unadulterated claptrap.
I have a recommendation for both. Try reading books. Here's how it
works. A serious author or scholar often spends years, perhaps a
decade, researching a topic or question that has puzzled him. If you
read his book carefully, you can digest in a matter of hours much of
what it took him years to discover. It's amazingly efficient!
Of course, the scholar's conclusions might be mistaken or biased. But
that's nothing but an argument for reading even more books on that
particular topic. Unfortunately, having obviously failed to do this,
Ferris (on Iraq) and Smerconish (on immigration) have fallen into the
trap that Walter Lippmann warned against decades ago: "No moral code,
as such, will enable [a person] to know whether he is exercising his
moral faculties on a real and an important event. For effective virtue,
as Socrates pointed out long ago, is knowledge; and a code of right and
wrong must wait upon a perception of the true and false." (Walter
Lippmann,
The Phantom Public, p. 20)
Does such pandering to the lowest common denominator by Ferris and
Smerconish explain the newspaper's recent gains in daily circulation?
Well, how does the
National Enquirer increase its circulation? Better yet, perhaps the best way to explain the
Inquirer's increased circulation is by analogy. Consider the assertion made by H.L. Mencken in 1920:
"As democracy is perfected, the office [of the President] represents,
more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a
lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land
will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be
adorned by a downright moron."
Having fulfilled Mencken's dire prediction with the election of President Bush, consider how his analogy might apply to the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
"As readership demographics are perfected, the management of the INKY
panders more and more closely to the inner soul of its Philadelphia
readers. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day
the plain readers of the INKY will reach their heart's desire at last,
and the INKY's Commentary Page will be edited and staffed by downright
morons."
Are we there yet?
Walter C. Uhler
is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been
published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow
Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the
Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA)
Writings 
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