The Stupid Treatment

Is it just me, or has the world begun treating people as a lot more stupid in recent history? I find myself asking this question regularly as I look at the way that we are being treated by everything from entertainment to politics. I submit the following as evidence:

• Television networks seemed convinced that we will be entertained by shows about about the lives of people whose company we would take great pains to avoid.
• Pharmaceutical companies attempt to convince us in commercials to have a doctor put us on medications that have the potential of causing such side effects as rectal bleeding or death.
• Syndicated radio shows that we can listen to for free attempt to convince us that I should instead pay them a monthly fee to watch them perform this show on our computers. (How we are supposed to work using that computer while doing so is strangely left unexplained.)
• Infomercials seemed convinced that our lives would be truly fulfilled if we would only start that collection of quarters, buy a new set of knives, or trade in a working vacuum cleaner for any one of a dozen different new ones. (That is of course, when they are not telling us that they know the secret of making money, and they will share it if we share some of our money with them. I know it too, it's getting a bunch of mooks to send you a check to learn your secret.)
• The lawyers in Congress tell us that health care is too expensive because the doctors make too much money, while the doctors say that the cost increases in medicine are mostly about the cost of hiring lawyers to defend themselves in lawsuits.
• Car companies provide a warranty on the engine and drive train of up to 100,000 miles, but provide little or no warranty on the body or interior of the car. (What good the engine and drive train will do me without the body and interior has yet to be explained.)
• Some scientists tell us that the human race must stop producing greenhouse gases before they drive the temperature up from 2 to 10 degrees and melt the polar ice caps causing cataclysmic floods. Then they tell us that if we do so, it will only make about .5 degrees difference in those increases.
• Karl Rove (the Deputy Chief of Staff under former Republican president George W. Bush) wants us to believe that what's wrong with the country today is that Democrats are spending too much money, when the Administration that he worked for was doing pretty much the same thing on only a slightly smaller scale.
• Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tells us that Congress needs to pass health care legislation first, so that we can learn what's in it afterward. (which may not make sense but does kind of solve the problem that Congress has been having in reading bills before voting on them)

I'm sure that there is a reasonable and logical explanation for the apparent disconnect of such information, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is, which is I suppose why I at least am considered stupid. 


Now perhaps there is a government study currently going on somewhere, consuming vast amounts of tax-supported resources to come up with a truly scholarly work on the subject. Have no fear however, when and if the answer is finally released in such a ponderous document written in academic code, we will all probably be too stupid to understand it.