In one day's worth of self-assigned reading, I first took on a lengthy piece that was in part about how so-called "postmodernists" reject the Enlightenment as excessively bound to rational analysis. The complaint is that reason demands objective data to support whatever hypothesis is presented as a plausible explanation for whatever is at issue. I prize the great Enlightenment scientists and philosophers for that very discipline and have tried earnestly to practice it in in my own research and writing.

The second article detailed the layout of millions of dollars by the infamous Koch brothers and their cohorts to fund the airing of creative lies in support of their puppet candidates and to smear the opposition. The ads are, at worst, vicious lies and, at best, composed of less-than-half truths.

Most of them do not appear in print but in the clever masterwork of the evanescent 30-second television spot that is as much subliminal as direct. Since a vast majority of voting Americans gets its political infotainment via that medium or from the megaphonic talk-show barkers, it is safe to say that such ad hominem promos and on-the-air homilies are playing to the resentments of those who feel in some way or another self-centeredly aggrieved by things as they are.

From the preachments of a Rush Limbaugh and the baleful light of the ever-present TV screen, the much-remarked-upon angry white voter marches off to the polls and casts a ballot in obedience to the Gospel According to the Kochs, which advocates the legalization of corporate larceny, the deliberate neglect of the poor (they are poor because they choose to be) and the not-so-subtle suppression of their economic and social aspirations. That pretty much answers William Allen White's celebrated question: "What's the matter with Kansas?" -- or fill in the name of your own state.

My third piece of reading told of recently enacted laws in Ohio, which are seen by the careful observer to be not-so-subtle efforts effectively to disenfranchise urban residents (mostly African and Hispanic Americans), the elderly and any other life form that might be expected to vote Democratic. Naturally, the new batch of statutes is being trumpeted as a guarantee against voter fraud, a thing that is, by the way, a nonexistent problem in this country. The problem is persuading more people to exercise their franchise.

Putting the three items of that day's reading into the blender yielded a puree of ignorance and mendacity that smells to high heaven. It raises the question of why such tactics work in a nation that has Harvard, MIT and Princeton on one coast and Stanford and Cal Tech on the other with such top-drawer universities as those of Chicago and Michigan in its heartland. Why so much ignorance in a nation that has had universal, no-tuition public el-hi education for more than a century and -- save for the Murdoch-Fox News group -- a relatively informative press?

One answer is that a rising tide of religiosity, the mind-numbing mediocrity of television and the general attention-deficit-disorder mien of the current American culture have allowed the greater part of the populous to slide into a mental torpor in which easy answers are sought -- if answers are sought at all. The research required to do so is evidently beyond the capabilities or at least the ambition of the average person.

Research worthy of the name requires mastery of the data relevant to the hypothesis the researcher is trying to validate. It is a process in which there are few stupid questions, only stupid answers, i.e. the ones arrived at quickly and with an obvious bias toward predetermined results that are often crafted with a novelist's touch.

The Enlightenment, as E.L. Doctorow points out with his usual precision, brought a new day in the matter of how to discover what was so: "When Bacon and Galileo insisted on putting claims of knowledge to the test with observation and experiment, storytelling as the prime means of understanding the world was so reduced in authority that today it is only children who continue to believe that stories are, by the fact of their being told, true. Children and fundamentalists."*

The Koch brothers' funded lies would have limited affect and effect if more Americans could and would embrace Enlightenment principles and methods. Our schools need to stress such principles and methods as avenues to actual knowledge. Skepticism and doubt need to be lifted up as values, not categorized as meddlesome and anti-social.

The stories told by lying ads can be sorted out through careful study to discover what is true about them and what is not. The tales spun by Ohio legislators about alleged election fraud have been exposed as bogus, though unthinking voters operating on mostly perceived grievances find it convenient to believe them in attempts to justify their prejudices.

A good dose of Enlightenment principles helped along by turning down (or off) the television and thinking instead of emoting would save the country a lot of trouble.

However, having become somewhat pessimistic about the civic will to think, I shall close with a sentiment similar to that which evidently caused Robert Frost -- after setting down 402 odic lines celebrating the State of New Hampshire -- to add the 403rd and last: "At present I am living in Vermont."

*Reporting the Universe. "Texts That Are Sacred, Texts That Are Not." Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 2003, 55