Other Interpretations.

The Ordinary American is remarkably innumerate, by and large. My mother, who directs a business school with a large body of former blue-collar workers seeking better opportunities in a white-collar world (itself increasingly bereft of opportunity, but so it goes), remains shocked a dozen years after she began as an instructor there: "I still can't believe that you can get through life without understanding fractions and percentages. How do they follow their banking? How can they use their credit cards?" Cluelessly is the obvious answer. Numbers remain as mysterious to the Americano as science does.

Here is Mark Noonan on the "bit of hyperbole" that paints America as one train-schedule away from the camps. He cites a poll that shows a majority of Americans who believe that, as regards civil rights and liberties, the porridge is either a bit too cool or just about right, then cavils: "Given that it is a poll of 1,013 adults, it probably underestimates the pro-Bush position by about 10 percentage points." There's no explanation for why that particular number of respondents indicates a 10-point positive discrepancy toward the author's own position, so we're left to presume that it's one of those eternal mathematical and physical truths, like the value of pi or Planck's constant. Noonan, like most conservatives--hell, like most Americans--doesn't really know what a poll actually is, and probably prefers it that way, leaving the secrets of the temple to the priests, such as they are.

In any case, I'm not certain why a majority saying that Bush is doing all right or not enough when it comes to curtailing rights in pursuit of a new course to be stayed in the Forever War indicates that we're not on the verge of dictatorship. Isn't it more likely the case that dictatorship, more or less, is exactly what the people want, operating, as the people usually do, on the bland assumption that the rolling heads won't be their own?

Update: Links fixed.