Bob Rucho - Why I'm Constantly Having to Defend the South

NC State Senator - Bob Rucho (R)

Having grown up and lived in the South all my life, I constantly find myself having to defend things about it.  Sometimes it's the weather, I mean the heat can be ridiculous on what I like to call the South Coast.  Fattening foods?  You bet, but man I love me some fried stuff and creole everything.  The biggest problem with the South is the people.  Before you get your knickers in a twist let me explain that I don't mean all of us down here in Dixie.  There's plenty to be proud of.  But there's a gigantic, huge percentage of Southern white folk who are just a plain embarrassment.

There have always been rednecks.  America has always known about them.  But with the rise of the Tea Party and the solid red state obstructionism in Congress, people are beginning to see how some of our "best and brightest", our elected officials, those we choose to represent us to the nation and the world on occasion, frequently fall far short in public displays.

New to the hall of shame is a state senator from North Carolina's 39th district, Robert Rucho.  I don't know if it's true or not but the gentleman's Wiki entry says he has never denied that his parents are blood relatives.  Rucho is a dentist by trade and a graduate of Northeastern University which is a pretty prestigious Boston school.  Maybe this is all an indictment of education in our country in general but let's focus on Rucho for now.  And actually he's not a true Southerner; he was born in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Yesterday, December 15, Rucho sent out the following tweet:

I'm not going to go with the obvious here and attack yet another Obama equals Hitler argument.  I'll just forget that the statement is absolutely insane.  If he's being serious then he has some serious mental issues.  Of course I think most in the Tea Party do.  But what I'm going after here are the obvious grammatical errors.

Politicians in the past have usually had a secretary, administrative assistant, speech writer, whatever to write up things for them to be put out for public consumption.  Not so much with Twitter.  Now we're getting to see what we're really dealing with more often.  Bob Rucho has a B.S. degree from Northeastern University, a D.D.S. degree from the Medical College of Virginia, Specialty in Prosthodontics from Boston University, and an MBA from UNC-Charlotte.  Two graduate degrees.  Yet he can't differentiate between "then" and "than".  His tweet should have read "done more damage to the USA than", not "then".  I know we have issues with people knowing the difference between "your" and "you're", and "their", "they're", and "there".  But "than" and "then"?  Come on man.  It's bad enough that people across America have problems with these basics, notably Sarah Palin's daughters; do we not have some way to check these things before kids graduate high school?

Picky on my part?  Sure, but something as small as this tells me a lot about a person and their level of intellectual curiosity.  With all of the course work this man has done in his life, how many times would you suppose he has come across "than" and "then" being used correctly?  Thousands?  Millions?  Yet it never crossed his mind that he has been using it incorrectly?  And not knowing the proper usage how did he get through all that college anyway?  In the first part of the tweet he says "Justice Robert's pen & Obamacare has done" when it should be "have done".  I mean, sweet mother, how can a man with this level of education not know?  How does he not hear it back in his head and know instinctively that it's wrong?

These issues aren't limited to the South.  It's an American crisis that people can go through college and get advanced degrees and still not understand basic rules of grammar or how to properly pronounce things.  I mean I can understand to a degree.  I was in my early 20s before I realized it was sherbet, not sherbert.  And spell check didn't catch sherbert so I guess that's not that big of a deal.  And you can certainly understand the problem in a case like George W. Bush.

George W. Bush

This was a man who had come from a very wealthy, old money Connecticut background.  Summers in Kennebunkport, the best schools money could buy.  Everything in our country that comes with privilege, this man had.  Harvard and Yale and Andover.  There is no finer education to be had in this nation.  Maybe not in the world.  His father was the head of the CIA before becoming vice-president and then president of our country.  But this man couldn't pronounce the word nuclear correctly.  So yea, I understand that, coming from privilege, people are going to be very selective in correcting you.  Especially when your family is like the Bushes.  But how many times in his life do you think George W. Bush heard the word nuclear pronounced correctly?  I'm sure thousands, at least.  Yet what consistently came out of his mouth was nook-you-ler, not noo-klee-er as it should be pronounced.
In both cases I can't help but believe both men are just not very bright.  You can wave all the paper you want in my face and show me what they've attained but if you can be so unobservant, so incurious, how can you say you're anything but just dumb?  And despite "Yankee" origins in both of these cases, both men having received good educations in Boston, both men are now associated with the South.

Congressman Paul Broun (R)

How about Paul Broun, a congressman from Georgia's 10th district?  This man is a doctor, an MD.  Graduate of the University of Georgia and Georgia Regents University where he received his MD.  I'm just going to throw him in here for being a moron.  I won't bother digging for grammar issues.  After the 2008 election when President Obama was discussing the possibility of starting a civilian national service corps Broun said "That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."  When discussing evolution before a group of hunters and other assorted weirdos Broun called evolutionary theory "lies from the pit of hell".  Okay, I know most Southern Baptists share this notion and maybe he was just playing to the crowd, well I'm pretty sure of that.  But statements like these from a freaking doctor for God's sake?  A freaking MD!  Can you really be stupid and become a doctor, a lawyer, have an MBA?

Well actually the answer to this is yes.  A college education in America doesn't really do much other than teach you how to do something in the case of doctors and lawyers.  It's more like a trade school.  Once upon a time there was such a thing as a "well rounded education".  That literally meant something.  Maybe that's just limited to certain liberal arts colleges these days?  I come across people with MBAs all the time, and lawyers, and doctors who can't nail down basics of grammar.  Who don't know much about a map of the world.  Don't know the basics of our country or history in general.

I don't know if this has always been the case.  Maybe our attention spans just can't handle it these days.  But all the men I've mentioned here are older than me and I was raised on TV.  I remember eating on a TV tray watching Hogan's Heroes and Laugh In.  I did also have a set of encyclopedias and would open them to random pages and just casually read and learn something I didn't know before.  I would study maps like I was training to be a cartographer.  In short, what I had is what's called intellectual curiosity.  It wasn't taught to me; I just had it.  So I guess the question is are we born with this, is it learned, can it be taught?

Typical Tea Party Moron

I've seen studies saying that people who are conservative are typically not as smart and also the converse.  I think an accurate barometer would be, among college educated liberals and conservatives, which is the smarter group?  Since both sides have poor and undereducated elements those parts would pretty much wash.  I was trying to find some info on this and ran across a conservative blog bragging about the right being smarter than the left and pointing to a quiz on the Pew Research Center's website.  I scored 13 out of 13 on the quiz.  But I'm politically aware.  It would be very hard to put together a sample group to test and they didn't ask my political affiliation on the quiz.  If you'd like to give it a go you can take the quiz here:  http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/the-news-iq-quiz/

Science Torturing a Child

Part of the problem with the whole looking stupid thing is that, in the conservative community, and in the South especially, it's considered to be in poor taste or perhaps even blasphemous to question certain things.  Certainly it's ok to question science because of, well you know, the Devil.  Science is a big bogey man with those conservatives who consider themselves to be Christian.  The whole Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, current climate science, all of the things that question the legitimacy of religion or the status quo where it's perfectly okay to drive gigantic polluting vehicles or destroy the earth is to be questioned or denied outright.  And these people will call the sky green if it's what they think they're supposed to say.  Just ask the two "scientists" who go on Fox News to deny global warming exists.  Nobody wants to stick out as being "uppity" or a "know it all" or even overly educated.  Even doctors.  Conservatives know that it's the academics in their ivory towers who have been destroying our nation with their liberal ideas and Marxist teaching methods.  It's these hippies who have introduced notions like global warming in their effort to destroy capitalism and erase what we've fought for:  corporate profits and gun toting freedoms.

I really do suspect that Paul Broun is just playing the role.  I don't think he's half as stupid as he tries to sound.  But examples like Bob Rucho and our former President Bush point out some glaring problems in what we expect and accept from our leaders.  They point out basic problems in our system of higher education.  When a man can get a graduate degree and not understand basic grammar we have some very deep problems on our hands.  It's no wonder America continues to fall behind internationally in all categories of education.  If we keep teaching to the tests and forgiving a lack of knowledge of the basics we'll continue to fall behind.  And if we keep putting imbeciles in charge of our politics we'll be hopelessly lost.