California's governor

(updated below)

The New York Times’ Bob Herbert laments America’s falling educational achievement levels. The College Board reports that America “has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations” in the percentage of young people with college degrees. The current generation, the College Board cautions, “will not approach their parents’ level of education.” Herbert raises the alarm about a society “that often holds intellectual achievement in contempt”:

What is the matter with us? Have we been drinking? Whatever happened to that vaunted American dream? In Hawaii, the public schools were closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year for budget reasons.

When this is the educational environment, you can say goodbye to the kind of cultural, scientific and economic achievements that combine to make a great nation. We no longer know how to put our people to work. We read less and less and write like barbarians. We’ve increasingly turned our backs on the very idea of hard-won excellence while flinging open the doors to decadence and decline. No wonder Lady Gaga and Snooki from “Jersey Shore” are cultural heroes.

Of course, “What’s the matter with kids today?” goes back at least to Paul Lynde and Bye, Bye Birdie (1963). But honestly, things are a bit worse than Herbert lets on, as South Carolina Republican, Congressman Bob Inglis, told Mother Jones this week in Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty. Once it was conservative oldsters who complained the loudest about unruly kids. Now their “intellectual” heirs are voters like these — and a party turned toward “demagoguery and hucksterism” — who want to control the world’s largest nuclear arsenal [emphasis mine]:

During his primary campaign, Inglis repeatedly encountered enraged conservatives whom he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—satisfy. Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here’s what took place:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

Wow, indeed.

UPDATE: Speaking of barbarism, Glenn Greenwald points to a recent Wall Street Journal article about how cash-strapped states are letting paved roads revert to gravel — ‘Back to Stone Age,’ the Journal suggests. The trend is part of the spreading decline in public infrastructure — schools, buses, even streetlights — as the economic downturn lengthens, “what a collapsing empire looks like,” Greenwald suggests.

So how about we invade Iran looking for WMDs next?