Psudo wrote:
You can't judge the education or intelligence level of a population though a man-on-the-street survey of trivial points of information. Political figures are not as relevant in peoples' daily lives as they like to think they are.
It's interesting, because I am reminded of an interview with Mark Steyn I read a while back, where he talked about looking at newspapers covering the McKinley assasination back in 1901. He expected the papers to treat the story as a huge, epic thing—the way we would expect a political assasination to be treated today. But instead, he said, it was considered a reltively minor story of minor importance, because in those days the average citizen regarded the president as a fairly marginal, distant figure who they didn't care much about. And with good reason, was Steyn's thesis, because politicians
are not really that relevant. The mass media has just taught us to think differently, in large part because they now have papers and airwaves to fill with "news" 24/7, and every stupid inconsequential thing a politician says or does is now being treated as a legitimate "event" in and of itself.
I like politics a lot, obviously, and I like studying it. But I do so with the understanding that it's a fairly esoteric matter, not really different from studying botany or what have you.
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