The All-American Hobbes

I try to not judge a piece until I have read through it completely but I could not help myself in Chris Hedges's article, "America the Illiterate." I thought his views were very radical. I am not to say they are completely in accurate but they were extreme. This article really did feel like a rant instead of an argument or statement. As I read I felt there was very little support to what he said. The statistics he gave without citing a source in particular. He also did not seem to have much of an audience that he was writing for because he never incorporated the audience unless you count him basically calling the general American population superficial and illiterate. This in itself is contradictory because the illiterate American population would not be able to read his article. As a side note I did enjoy the picture he supplied that had nothing to do with his article which may have purposely been placed there.

In the building of skeptics Nicholas Carr's room (with his article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?") would be on the middle floor and be the sunroom. Chris Hedges's room would be the basement with broken lights. Although both authors have the same general topic of the lack of literacy Carr toys with the question of how much we American's have been harmfully effected by technology possibly answering with a 'yes, no, maybe so' where as Hedges takes the question and runs with it stating that the general population has become ignorant, indulging, and illiterate. Hedges also claims that in the past speeches giving by political icons they were given at higher comprehension levels (i.e. grade 10 or 11 and etc). Perhaps Hedges is correct that Abraham Lincoln may have given a speech for grade level 12 but we must take into consideration what percent of the population actually understood the speech verses the percent that understands at a lower graded speech.

Perhaps Hedges unsupported statistic that nearly one third of the American population is correct but what is important is that our society is moving forward because I can guarantee that statistic has lowered significantly since the establishment of America.


Call me a bit of a Locke but I fail to believe Americans are as stupidly ignorant as Mr. Hedges would like us to believe.