James Fallows, in the April Atlantic, on the media and the public:
“I am sad at what feels like a decline in our public culture,” I was told by Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and the author of the recent The Whites of Their Eyes, which compares today’s Tea Party activists with the original Revolutionary War activists. “It feels like a personally abusive and textually violent time.” But she went on to say that it is hard to demonstrate that today’s media and resulting public discussion are, in their totality, worse than before…
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“It’s not so much that American public life is more idiotic,” Jill Lepore said, referring to both press coverage and the public discussion it spawns. “It’s that so much more of American life is public. I think that goes a long way to explaining what seems to be a ‘decline.’ Everything is documented, and little of it is edited. Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization.”
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She added that since the 1940s, political scientists had tried to measure how well American citizens understood the basic facts and concepts of the nation and world they live in. “It actually is a constant,” she said. “There is a somewhat intractable low level of basic political knowledge.”
The Washington Post, just after the government shutdown was averted this weekend, reports “In Okla., a beneficiary sours on federal spending“:
OKLAHOMA CITY — Lawyer John Hager paid scant attention as Congress and the White House raced against the clock to strike a budget deal that narrowly averted a governmenent shutdown.
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As the budget battle moves into its next phase in the coming weeks, he hopes lawmakers will cut the federal budget by much more than the $38 billion trimmed in the current spending plan. The less federal government, he said, the better.
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“Centralized anything doesn’t really work,” Hager said, adding that he was unperturbed by the prospect of a federal shutdown. “I’m not sure what they do has a big impact on my life.’’
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That jaundiced view of the federal government is common here, local leaders say, even though the region’s surging economy is built to a large degree on a foundation of federal spending.
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About 7 percent of the area’s workers are federal employees, more than double the U.S. average, according to a Washington Post analysis. Meanwhile, federal spending on roads, a huge Federal Aviation Administration center and a sprawling Air Force base not only keeps more than 20,000 civilians employed but also is helping to nurture entire sectors of the area’s increasingly prosperous and diverse economy.
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Overall, the state gets back $1.35 for every dollar its residents and businesses pay in federal taxes, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group. That’s the 15th most generous return among the 50 states.
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“On one hand, you have this fairly heavy concentration of federal employees and spending here,” said Cindy Rosenthal, a University of Oklahoma political scientist and mayor of nearby Norman. “On the other hand, there is a lot of sentiment that the federal government is too large, too intrusive and probably too wasteful.”…
I’d have thought that a lawyer — pretty much the economic version of what ecologists call an apex predator — would want to have some clue as to the tapsprings feeding the local watering holes. For most people, most of the time, politics may be just another godsdamned hobby, but this kind of intellectual disconnection seems almost willfully delusional.