HEART(S) OF DUMBNESS: Friend, do you hate dental floss?

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2019

The literature of self-defeat: Which of our nation's mice is dumber—our highly erudite city mice, or their dimwitted country cousins?

This past Sunday, the New York Times gave the familiar mandated answer to this familiar old question. It seems that a small group of country mice decided to pay their town's librarian $19 an hour, even though a visiting, two-degree city mouse had told them to pay 25.

The city mouse denounced the dumbness of the rubes on the first page of the Sunday Review. She employed every hackneyed element of the familiar novelized genre, not excluding this shopworn groaner:

They won't even let us smarter people tell them what to do!

Also, the country mice were said to be "very religious." More on that to come.

The essay by this credentialed city mouse ran beneath a stinging headline. The headline explained where the country mice live:

In the Land of Self-Defeat

Those country mice are just so dumb that they don't even pursue their own interest! So it goes when our own dimwitted tribe shouts its own view of the world.

Is it really true that the rural white crowd is dumber than us Over Here? Is it really true that the country mice engineer self-defeat, while we city mice steam ahead, skillfully shaping our future?

We're not sure what planet that writer lives on—the writer who dreamed that contrast.

Concerning the erudition of the country mice, we'll assume that, as with everyone else, there's plenty of room for improvement. But good God! Has any tribal group been any dumber, or more self-defeating, than our own upper-class liberal tribe over the past thirty years?

We may be the dumbest tribe ever seen on the planet. That said, we're so dumb that our credentialed think tank scholars have no idea of this fact.

How spectacularly dumb has the liberal world been starting in, let's say, 1987? To what extent has the liberal world fashioned persistent defeat?

Liberal angst is currently focused on the reign of Donald J. Trump. For ourselves, we think the man is highly disordered and dangerous.

That said, our allegedly brilliant liberal team spent decades putting Donald J. Trump where he is. People like that think tank seer were too dumb—and not infrequently, too careerist—to blow the whistle concerning this gruesome process.

How did our dimwitted liberal team help elect Donald J. Trump? As an aside, standard jibes about the country mice being "very religious" probably didn't help.

For today, we'd mainly point to the decades of slander our city mice enabled and aimed at the candidate Trump beat, though only under our arcane electoral rules and only while losing the popular vote.

People like the New York Times' think tank expert sat on their ascots, year after year, while that other candidate was slimed and degraded as "Evita Peron" and "Nurse Ratched"—and we're speaking her about the gender-based sliming which came at her from the top end of the mainstream and "liberal" press.

Monica Potts sat on her aspic while Maureen Dowd had her deeply unfortunate way with the political world. On June 22, 2008, Clark Hoyt, then the Times' public editor, savaged Dowd for "the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on [Candidate] Clinton." Among other things, the gentleman offered this:

HOYT (6/22/08): Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that [previously cited Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

...[T]he relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton—in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1—left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed.

Plainly, Hoyt also believed that a line had been crossed. That said, these inane assaults on Candidate Clinton had been going on for many years by the time Hoyt wrote his column. And not only that:

During Campaign 2000, Dowd had written seven columns focusing on Candidate Gore's bald spot, including the demented column which appeared in the New York Times on the Sunday before that election—an election in which Gore was defeated by roughly 11 votes.

Stating the obvious, those attacks on Candidate Gore were also attacks aimed at Clinton and Clinton. This was a seamless, 25-year campaign, built around ongoing themes.

Needless to say, Hoyt's complaint about the sexist attacks on Candidate Clinton produced exactly zero discussion within the upper-end press. Maureen Dowd was too big a player at the Times to permit such discussion among grasping careerists at the journals, or in the well-funded billionaire/corporate realm of the think tank left.

Did Sunday's city mouse ever complain, back in real time, about the endless gender-based sliming of Nurse Ratched? As best we can tell, she did not. But the self-defeat in which our world has engaged simply defies comprehension. We kept it up right through Election Day 2016, at which point we put our brilliance on display by deciding to form a "resistance."

On the Friday night before that election, one of our academic wizards (Princeton) went on TV with Lawrence and said it would take a major weather event along the East Coast to give Trump a chance to win. Our rank and file believed these credentialed sachems, leading to the waves of confusion experienced by city mice the following Tuesday night.

By and large, we'd believed the credentialed experts, the people who had been failing us for decades by November 2016. These are the geniuses people like Potts strongly prefer to the dumb country mice who simply refused to take her advice about how to conduct their affairs.

It would take an entire book to chronicle our dimwitted tribe's decades-long romance with self-defeat. For now, let's move on to our manifest, world-class dumbness.

To put that dumbness on display, let's consider the literature of the New York Times. We'll direct you to a revealing feature which ran in print editions last Thursday morning.

Your lizard brain is going to tell you that we're being unfair. Your lizard will say that we've simply selected one piece out of the many wonderful items the wonderful New York Times runs.

We see the logic, but we reject the conclusion. Sometimes, the sheer stupidity of a tribe is too vast to wish away. That holds with the crazy things Donald Trump says—and with the frequently ludicrous work which appears in our glorious Times.

We're going to list last Thursday's feature under this unflattering heading:

Self-satisfied self-involvement

Self-satisfied self-involvement? Plainly, it's a major part of our deeply stupid, self-defeating city mouse tribal culture at the present time.

This dumbness presented itself on page A3 of last Thursday print editions, in a daily feature which started like this:

Here to Help
FIVE OPTIONS TO TRY IF YOU HATE FLOSSING

In our view, a tribe which tolerate nonsense like this as part of its journalism is a tribe that's too dumb to survive. A tribe reveals itself through its literature. On this day, part of our self-revealing literature continued along like this:

Here to Help
FIVE OPTIONS TO TRY IF YOU HATE FLOSSING

The research is limited, and flossing is not a cure-all, but it is still one of the few things people can do—along with brushing, drinking fluoridated water, rinsing with mouthwash, eating well, and going to the dentist regularly—to stand a chance against severe, long-term oral-health problems.

That's the way one youngish Times journalist started her feature this day. To read her longer on-line piece, you can just click here.

The writer was only seven years out of college (Wisconsin, class of 2012), but already she had descended to this level. It's where some of our brightest young minds end up under the weight of our dimwitted city mouse culture.

How dumb is that opening paragraph? If you can't see how dumb it is, you may be part of the problem! But as she starts, this young person is already pandering hard to self-involved New York Times readers.

Panic is invading the suburbs! She tells the readers to whom she is pandering that, aside from flossing, there are only a few things they can do to so much as "stand a chance against severe, long-term oral-health problems."

There are only a few things they can do! Along the way, she lists five:

A few other things they can do:
1) They can brush their teeth.
2) They can drink fluoridated water.
3) They can rinse with mouthwash.
4) They can eat well.
5) They can go to the dentist.

Might we make an observation about this list, which was assembled by a panic-stricken young city mouse who writes for the New York Times?

We'll guess that many New York Times readers are already brushing their teeth and going to the dentist. Beyond that, the leading authority on the topic says that roughly two-thirds of the nation's population can only avoid option #2 by refusing to drink their tap water.

It's hard to account for the hint of panic found in that opening paragraph. But as she continues, this fallen young journalist pretty much gives us a good solid laugh:

HERE TO HELP (continuing directly): Thankfully, in addition to string floss, you can find other interdental cleaners—things designed to clean between teeth—that are safe and effective. The best way to know whether an interdental cleaner is right for you is by asking your dentist, said Dr. Michele Neuburger, a dental officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Oral Health.

"Thankfully," New York Times readers who hate to floss "can find other interdental cleaners...that are safe and effective!"

So the journalist tells us. In a parody of journalistic process, she then asks a certified national expert how her readers can know which such cleaner is best for them.

The expert tells the New York Times journalist that her readers should ask their dentist! So it goes as the Times tries to help!

As she continues, the writer lists and discusses five different interdental cleaners the reader might ask about. As you can see at the link we provided, the third such cleaner is "Toothpicks." From there, the writers moves ahead to "Floss picks," a variant of same.

Please approach this remarkable piece as literature! Work like this is so stunningly fatuous that it inevitably tells us something about the tribe from which it emerges. And such nonsense appears on a daily basis on the Times' "reimagined" page A3, for which the Times fashioned a stunning motto:

You are the dumbest, most self-involved people on earth.
We at the Times want to serve you.

In fairness, this silly essay about the few ways the reader might stand a chance against severe, long-term oral-health problems is no dumber than vast amounts of the political writing the Times has offered down through the years. That includes the work of Dowd, the paper's defining star during the era in question.

It's also no dumber than much of what happens on the Rachel Maddow Show, whose beloved host refused to challenge the development of the Benghazi narratives all through the fall of 2012, then refused to challenge Comey the God after he attacked Candidate Clinton on July 5, 2016.

Indeed, the guest host on this TV star's program spent two nights endorsing Comey's point of view immediately after that July attack. These are a few of the ways the careerist sachems of our own ridiculous tribe engineered self-defeat.

How in the world did Candidate Trump squeeze by Candidate Clinton? Three of the prime-time hosts on our top tribal channel—Matthews, Williams and O'Donnell—played leading or significant roles in the decades of sliming aimed at Clinton, Clinton and Gore. This softened her up for the kill.

The biggest star on the channel, Maddow, will never tell you any such thing; she'll discuss Ed Meese instead. And because no one else will tell rank-and-file liberals such things, liberals out in San Francisco bow to cardboard cutouts of Maddow, their doula, much as many country mice defer to the claims of Sean Hannity.

Our tribe's behavior has been very dumb, almost wholly because of our "leaders." But at the Times, such a claim can only be made about our ridiculous cousins, the country mice! Good God, how dumb they are!

Our leadership has spent at least three decades fashioning self-defeat. Thanks to careerists at city mouse think tanks, good decent people within our tribe have never been told about this.

Still coming: Inside Arky churches