Legend has it that Thou must read Trashy Novels Whilst on a Beach, or otherwise vacationing, but some of us did the next best thing: we read about the decline and fall.

Not Gibbon: too much heft in that even with Kindles, Nooks and their Droid/Ipod apps to make the physical weight of the book irrelevant.

Besides, while Gibbon described how feckless politicians, obsessions with sex and religious othodoxy can bring a nation down, there is no reason to dwell on that past since we now have the opportunity to watch it up close and personal.

Yes, as discussed ad nauseum both here and elsewhere, anti-intellectualism and know nothingism have always had a major place in this nation which progressed in fits and starts despite it. Still, the idea that we can better our lot by education, and that a ditch digger should want his children to do something which, while physically easier, could do more for the society in general as well as improving her or his own lifestyle has been the prevailing one even before Thomas Jefferson championed the idea of public education.

Those days are over. The Great Reagan foretold our decline by announcing that

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

The era of me, my, mine was now endorsed by the President of the Untied States. Why should I pay taxes for things that do not immediately benefit me? If I do not send my own children to a public school, why should I have to foot the bill?

There was the answer in the lightest of summer reading: a newspaper (or its electronic equivalent). Many have spoken to the subject, of course, but this time it was E.J. Dionne who asked the critical question, which is almost rhetorical by now:

Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid?

Dionne answers the question well, but barely mentions Sarah Palin, the epitome today, as George W. Bush (Rob Ritchie to fans of "West Wing") was before her, of how gross ignorance has become something which can propel rather than derail a political career.

So, in the same newspaper, there is the great Susan Jacoby to tie it all together:

In the Alice-in-Wonderland universe inhabited by the queen of the Tea Party and her subjects, people who can't make the grade at top universities are not only better Americans but are morally superior to those who can.

It was the aforedescribed fictitious Governor Rob Ritchie (G W Bush's doppleganger) who explained it best, in talking to the highly educated President he was trying to unseat on "The West Wing":

You're what my friends call a superior sumbitch. You're an academic elitist and a snob. You're, uh, Hollywood, you're weak, you're liberal, and you can't be trusted. And if it appears from time to time as if I don't like you, well, those are just a few of the many reasons why.

Today's summer reading was, though, in the New York Times where Bob Herbert discusses explains the consequences of the Ritchie/Bush/Palin appeal where

instead of exercising the appropriate mental muscles, we're allowing ourselves to become a nation of nitwits, obsessed with the comings and goings of Lindsay Lohan and increasingly oblivious to crucially important societal issues that are all but screaming for attention. What should we be doing about the legions of jobless Americans, the deteriorating public schools, the debilitating wars, the scandalous economic inequality, the corporate hold on governmental affairs, the commercialization of the arts, the deficits?

When even Alan Greenspan gets it, you know that the end is nigh and that the circle has been completed. Yet, there he was, a pointy headed intellectual if there ever was one, but a quite conservative one , on Meet the Press last Sunday calling the supply side magic that the Great Reagan and his acolytes cannot stop repeating, to be the trick it is

MR. GREENSPAN: Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day, that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here on it.

MR. GREGORY: You don't agree with Republican leaders who say tax cuts pay for themselves?

MR. GREENSPAN: They do not.

Yet, of course, Republican orthodoxy teaches us thattax cuts do not add to the deficit and, as even Alan Greenspan has noticed, when such idiocy rules, it is hard to solve the real problems that face our nation:

I've been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I've never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I'm not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it's got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive. We've got to change it.

Yet, we tried to relax on a beach while listening to explanations that religious freedom should not extend to any area where adherents of a religion killed thousands of people, and that judges should honor public votes for a law under which a state can have its own immigration policy, or prohibiting people from marrying others of the same sex, even if those laws violate a Constitution which was intended to prevent exactly the sort of majority tyranny as we are urged to believe is an essential element of democracy.

A young musician---not Regina Spektor, not Jenny Owen Youngs (who have been celebrated previously in these posts) but Allison Weiss, after having graduated from the University of Georgia a month or so earlier, had to explain to somebody upbraiding the District Court for ignoring the will of the voters that some things are too fundamental to be decided by majority vote.

So, people still do get educated, and maybe there is reason to hope.