America the Incurious

In an interview with the Boston Globe, former 60 minutes anchor Mike Wallace says that this is what he would ask the president if given the chance:

What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn't want to travel. You knew very little about the military. . . . The governor of Texas doesn't have the kind of power that some governors have. . . . Why do you think they nominated you? . . . Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?

Incurious. That's a bit of a funny word - not used particularly often. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines it as

Lacking intellectual inquisitiveness or natural curiosity; uninterested.

As I think about that, since I do not lack curiosity, I wonder if that's not perhaps a remarkably accurate word for the condition that the wingnuts want both their leaders and their followers in. Rove and DeLay and the like don't want a President who pays attention and is inquisitive - that's not his job in their model. They want someone who will be a mouthpice, do what he's told, and really isn't interested in what's going on. Chimpy McPetGoat fits that model perfectly. He is one of the least intellectually engaged people I've ever seen - there really is no there there.

And I think (no offense to Schmidlap - not that he'll notice, he's busy pissing off the wingnuts again) that it's a better word than "stupid" for the teeming masses, yearning to never have to use their brains. Of course, those masses would never understand such a word, but that's really the point. The curious person learns about things different from what they already know, because there's a perceived value to them in the investigation - this leads to an intellectual journey which involves challenging one's beliefs, trying to see multiple points of view, and developing a deeper and more complex understanding of the world and of themselves. The incurious person disdains all that (sorry to the incurious, I know I'm using some polysyllabic words here) and lives in a world where they rely on someone (Rove, Dobson, etc) to tell them what to do and think, where they don't question their leaders, where Pete's cognitive dissonance questions never enter their mind, where it makes sense to vote against their self interest, and where they feel comfortable using myth and volume to replace science and reason. They have no problem with suspending a bilingual student for speaking Spanish instead of English in high school, because they lack the curiosity to understand cultures other than their own, and they don't want anyone to force them to deal with the unknown.

I'll close here with an answer to Mr. Wallace's final question - yes, I do believe that incuriosity has quite a lot to do with the reason the country is so [expletive]'d up.