We don’t talk about anything. If the middle Tennessee area represents the country at large, then as a nation we just aren’t talking about anything.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of talking going on, but the majority of all conversation and debate is usually so superficial it could be high school gossip.

There are about 40 people who work in the office where I work, and I might be able to tell you the names of about 10. What I can tell you from listening to the day to day conversation is their favorite T.V. shows, celebrity couples and bizarre local stories from around the country. Occasionally there’ll be a story of a missing white girl thrown in.

Back when I was pushing DVD’s for a major video store chain, they actually had an unwritten policy that we weren’t allowed talk about politics, religion or any other topic that would possibly create a hostile atmosphere. That’s fine, nobody wants a hostile workplace. But that policy is also in place in every other aspect of day to day life. People seem to be more willing to talk about the darkest parts of their personal lives than they are political policies or social problems. I’m more likely to learn of a person’s drug problem than I am their opinion about a political matter.

News outlets catch a lot of hell for superficial fake news, but it’s absolutely possible that the news has become a victim of supply and demand. Fox News is the most watched news channel on television, and if you look at any statistic done on news programming you’ll see Fox delivers more irrelevant garbage that any other station. The Project for Excellence in Journalism carried out a study from January to March of this year which shows Fox News spent 15 percent of its time covering the war in Iraq, and 10 percent covering Anna Nicole Smith.

It boggles the mind to imagine a major news outlet devoting 10 percent of its time to Anna Nicole Smith. But when all this was going down I couldn’t go anywhere without hearing the intimate details of this dead celebrity’s life. This might sound callous, but in no way whatsoever was she important or even talented. But this seems to be what the people in the U.S care and read about; if they read at all.

I don’t have a statistic to back it up, but I’d be willing to bet that more people know who Paris Hilton is than the vice president. More people vote on who’s going to be the next American Idol than they do President of the United States.

I have superficial interests like anyone else, but our culture, which is dominantly pop culture, perpetuates ignorance and anti-intellectualism. From shallow action movies, to vain rap music, to amazingly dumb reality television, popular aspects of American culture are making us more ignorant as a nation. So it’s very possible that reason people aren’t talking is because they simply have nothing to say.

tuckwopat@yahoo.com