Editor's note: Michael Ackley's columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.
News item: Young adults can't assimilate the facts hurled at them by the news media, and, according to the Associated Press, "have trouble accessing in-depth stories." This is attributed to young adults' tendency to multi-task (e.g., reading their e-mail while watching the news) and the daily "bombardment" of data from the media.
The AP says, "A key finding was that participants yearned for quality and in-depth reporting but had difficulty immediately accessing such content because they were bombarded by facts and updates in headlines and snippets of news."
Well, we're sure the firm conducting the study did a fine, scientific job, but it probably didn't consider that the younger generation, in the aggregate, is a collection of know-nothings and functional illiterates. They can't handle the daily "bombardment" because they can barely tie their shoes. "In-depth" for them is an alien concept.
H.L. Mencken had his "booboisee," the great unwashed of the early to mid-20th century. We're burdened with the "tubeoisee," the products of sensory overload from television, computer games, TV telephones and video iPods. The only medium they are missing out on is the book. As a result, they can't analyze, they can't judge, they can't think. (Hence: the popularity of a certain presidential candidate.)
Let's just add the term to the Blind Partisan's Dictionary:
tubeoisee – n. the class of overstimulated, undereducated individuals to whom political slogans seem the highest form of discourse; adj. – tubeois.Â
More dysfunction
Despite the arrant idiocy of young people, Democrats in California's Legislature are pushing Assembly Bill 1819, which would allow 16-year-olds to "preregister" to vote, actual registration becoming effective on their 18th birthdays.
If this thing becomes law, the Dems argue, young people will be "engaged" in the electoral process. Republican cynics, perhaps noting young folks' four-to-one preference for Barack Obama – over anybody – regard this as a plot to make Democrats of the unlettered graduates of our debauched education system. Appropriately, the capital city's daily ran its story on the scheme on the same day another yarn bore the headline, "Despite law, teens gab on phone while driving." (Another recent story has reported teens sending one another photos of themselves, nude, via cellular telephone. See "tubeoisee," above.)
A better way to engage young people, of course, is to teach them to read and understand the Constitution, but that would unfairly tax the adolescent vocabulary.
We think the Republicans are worried over little or nothing. Most teens won't preregister, because they aren't sufficiently "engaged" to act. The only real impact of AB 1819 will be to burden government with another record-keeping cost.
Pants on fire
If you repeat something you know to be untrue, and say it as though you believe it, does that make you a liar? The correct answer, of course, is "yes," and by these specifications Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is a liar. He knows Al Gore lost Florida, but continues to repeat the whopper that Gore had the presidency snatched from him in 2000 "by "five intellectually bankrupt Supreme Court justices who did the wrong thing."
He knows the Florida Supreme Court, with no litigation before it, seized control of the Sunshine State's vote countsua sponte – a which translates "on its own hook" – and tried to impose the endless recount. He knows it wasn't five justices who brought this process to a halt; it was seven. He knows that every recount showed George Bush won the state. The Democratic Party has been trading on what it knows is a lie since 2000. Hillary Clinton is a liar, too, for she also, knowingly made the same false claim.
It's quite possible the last honest thing Dean said was "eeeeahhh!" And the last true thing Clinton said was … well …
Our living language
And so the "strong verbs" of English continue in decline, thanks to the lower strata of the publicly educated, whose members go to debased colleges, earn devalued degrees in communications and move on to jobs in the electronic media. We can't tell you how many times in the past weeks we have heard broadcasters utter such abominations as "has went," "has ran" and even (it brings a shudder) "has did." Is there no hope for these participially challenged? Alas! There is not.