We got dumb when we stopped reading books

Sometimes it amazes me how much professional pundits try desperately to avoid the truth.

I was reading an article in the Washington Post by Mitchell Lerner, a professor at Ohio State claiming that the end of the Cold War was a major contributor to the ultimate election of Donald Trump.

 Lerner said Americans put aside their hatred of the federal government because of the need to battle the Russians in the Cold War. Once it ended, Americans no longer had use for the federal government.

That's a nice conservative point of view.

Of course it's wrong.

The right wing has spent more than 50 years attacking the government, defending the right of states to treat their residents badly.

We're one of the only countries in which you have fewer rights and/or privileges if you live in, say, Mississippi instead of New York.

The great irony of it all is that it's the people in those states who are conned into believing that they might be poor and ignorant, but they have more freedom than other Americans.


Ironically, if you look back before the Cold War, even before World War II, many of those same people respected the national government because of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At a time when the bankers and brokers were taking away houses, farms and businesses, FDR put the government to work for the little people.

What changed?

Nothing to do with war, cold or otherwise. What changed was that we went from being a nation that read books to a nation that watched television. Think of the people you know who haven't read a book since they finished school. People who no longer read newspapers or magazines. People who spend 40-50 hours a week watching television, getting their news from people who tell them what it means as well as what happened.

But one of the great forgotten stories of WWII was how soldiers and sailors, marines and airmen passed what spare time they had.

They read.

A non-profit called the Council on Books in Wartime provided books for both entertainment and educational purposes. Beginning in 1943 and ending in 1947, the CBW published 122 million copies of more than 1,300 titles.

"Books are weapons in the war of ideas."

Heck of a slogan, and one difficult to imagine making sense to Americans today. Millions of American servicemen came from rural areas in those days, and the books they read in the Armed Services Editions exposed them to a world they had never known.

One thing proven over the years is that reading stimulates brain waves and watching television makes you more passive.

Add in the Internet over the last 25 years or so and we're not only more passive, we have shorter attention spans.

Too many of us don't read.

Too many of us spend too much time in front of screens.

Too many of us form our opinions based on the loudest voices we hear.

We don't hate the government because the Cold War is over.

We hate the government because we got stupid and allowed the wrong people to take control of it.

The solution?

Smarten up ... and take it back.