Commentary: Flat-earthers' fatherland

WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- Germany was once rightly called "Das Land der Dichter und Denker" - the land of poets and thinkers. That was back in the 19th century, when monarchs with spiked helmets still ruled the Reich, whose educational system was unsurpassed.

But look at it now: One fifth of all Germans - and one-third of those under age 30 - believe that the U.S. government may have been behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The theory propounded in Germany's pestilential talk shows and even pseudo-academic symposia is this: The Bush administration staged this event in 2001 to have an excuse for an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Before we get too much worked up about this, though, let's not lose sight of the fact that this is definitely the age of neither reason nor faith. This era abounds with proof that irrationality in the Western world seems to have reached the level of the throng on the Arab street, which will not be persuaded of Usay's and Qusay's death - coroner's reports and their video-filmed cadavers notwithstanding.

Postmodernity has replaced René Descartes dictum, "I think, therefore I am," with a new truism: "I prattle, therefore I am somebody."

You don't have to go to Germany to hear people aver that George W. Bush marched into Iraq "because he wanted the oil." They'll tell you that in many New York parlors, regardless of what learned folk of all political persuasions had written about Saddam Hussein's evil designs.

What do you expect of a society where television anchors poll you - yes, you! - every morning on intricate issues politicians, soldiers, and spooks are wrestling with behind closed doors, and evidently not too successfully? Stop shaving and opine by e-mail; your views may be wobbly but they matter to us.

My late mother-in-law, who still belonged to the thinking generation, lived to experience the early stages of this folly - and rejoiced over the fact that she was on her way out by then. "How the hell do you expect me to know this?" she used to fume. "What am I paying my taxes for, if not to employ people who know better?"

That kind of reasoning has gone the way of Descartes' logic. How this happened is most easily explained by the example of Germany, a nation usually known for its thoroughness. When during the rambunctious late 1960s Herbert Marcuse, the German-American social philosopher, commanded rebellious students, "Macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht" (destroy what is destroying you) - especially academic traditions - they followed in lockstep.

In those days, a "little red students' book" instructed the young to stop learning, lest their knowledge be exploited later "by the system." They obeyed with such ferocity that it had lasting consequences: In a recent survey of the knowledge and skills of 15-year olds in the 32 principal industrial countries, Germany ranked among the bottom third.

But let's not single out Germany. Verbosely expressed lunacy is not an exclusively Teutonic province. Was it not America where political correctness was first made to supersede academic rigor? Was it not here that highly educated people committed mass suicide in order to meet a spaceship that would take them to some distant celestial idyll? Was it not a Harvard academic, Timothy Leary, who became a celebrity by instructing his followers: "Tune in, turn on, drop out"?

If you wonder why so many of today's young Germans are incapable of thinking clearly, become a scholastic, go to the sources. Germans always want to perfect things - and in this case they perfected American follies, including the folly of anti-Americanism and sexual confusion.

When former German justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin compared George W. Bush with Hitler last year, she only followed a prominent U.S. church leader. When Hamburg's Lutheran bishop, Maria Jebsen, wrote the preface to a tome titled "Divinely Lesbian," she only parroted the American fad of stirring off-color libido and theology into one unappetizing stew.

Is America at fault, then? No, not really. America is just big and therefore sets the global standards, including the trend of transmitting and receiving knowledge via television sound bites and Internet chat rooms.

You can resist it, and many Germans do. These are the ones still studying their country's superb daily newspapers, and of course they do not believe that Washington sponsored the Sept. 11 attacks.

In other words, they still know that the earth is round, to use a metaphor. But don't kid yourself - the flat-earth movement is marching on in the Fatherland, whose television-obsessed youth is rapidly dropping out of its nation's legacy of poetry and thought. In a recent poll, a 51-percent majority declared Thomas Gottschalk, a local television personality, more important than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, one of history's greatest minds.

Don't snigger - surveys in the United States would produce similar results. The drama is this, though: How can you expect free society as we know it to survive when an ever-growing proportion of the decision-makers - the voters - base their views exclusively on sound bites, Internet chats, and instant gobbledygook culled by morning anchors from their sleepy audiences?

There's one potential long-term remedy, of course: Switch off the box; read a book. But to get to this point requires the efforts of an increasingly rare species - heroic parents prepared to resist electronic tyranny in order to save our civilization.