Currently... (via FB friend)

I'm coming to realize:
A lottt of people simply don't know much about what's going on in the world. They engage with the news in a very surface-level way. And even if they *did* take a deeper dive, they often lack the foundational knowledge and and context that they would need to interpret it correctly.
And I'm not just talking about slack-jawed yokels. I'm talking about the obliviously entitled Karens and Kevins of the world – the largely white, tract-and-townhouse-dwelling, living-laughing-loving middle-class masses. People who haven't an ounce of cultural curiosity in their bodies – but know that they resent when their Super Bowl and gender reveal parties are inconvenienced in the slightest way, or when they're expected to care about anyone or anything outside of their Marshall's-home-decor-department-ass world.
As a kid, I guess I just assumed that keeping up with news and politics was a requisite part of being an adult. I mean, if the adults weren't gonna attend to this stuff, who *was*?
And I'm still struggling to correct and overcome that assumption. Thousands of adults – nay, *millions* – never really developed past high school, in terms of social and political awareness. The moment they could stop learning about these things, they stopped.
These people are the core of Trump's base, at least here in the suburbs. Not the committed fascist, but the oblivious petite bourgeoisie. Not the ideologue, but those whose understanding of the world stops at the boundaries of their peaceful housing development – and who are therefore inclined to see any disruption in the broader world as a threat to "law and order". (Christ knows that the news targeted at them is going to present it as such.)
I should note that many of these people have busy lives – working, raising kids, maintaining homes. Many of them don't have *time* to read hours of news every day.
But if you have time to post stupid angry shit on your local newspaper's Facebook posts, or to cover your lawn with tacky patriotica for Memorial Day – then you probably have time to read a book or something.
"[Hannah] Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann 'the banality of evil': he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a 'joiner', in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt's thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief."
The average Dodge Charger owner isn't Adolph Eichmann, of course – but the paragraph above applies all the same. They wave the American flag and the Constitution not because they have deep and coherent convictions about the founding principles of the United States – but to affirm their entitlement to their place in the social order. (This entitlement is foundational to their understanding of American-ness – any philosophy which threatens their status is, by definition, un-American.)
If a different flag promised that entitlement to them, they'd wave that one instead. They aren't principled people. They're overgrown teenagers, who sense that their place in the pecking order is becoming precarious. So they line up behind the nearest flagpole that offers security.
I should say – #NotAllPetiteBourgeoisie. Belonging to this class doesn't *guarantee* that you're like this, and many folks of this class *aren't* like this. But it does mean that you can *get away* with being like this – and people, in general, take the path of least resistance.
I dunno. I'm probably being a dick here, as usual. But this is what I'm feeling at the moment. Our country's gonna be undone by a bunch of former C students who resent that people keep interrupting their viewing of Jersey Shore and asking them to think and care and stuff. Who resent it so much, in fact, that they're willing to line up behind naked fascism. (Not that they understand that that's what they're doing.)