The Opinions of the Truculently Uninformed

Everyone has one of those friends: The guy (or gal) who maintains feverishly ideological opinions on current events without troubling himself (or herself) to keep even moderately informed. Is anyone more enraging? (Other than Tom Cruise, of course.)

A Nader voter who hasn’t even passing familiarity with economics; a self-proclaimed Hezbollah enthusiast who thinks Israel was created by the USA in 1986; a Tom Delay supporter who’s never heard of Jack Abramoff—these are the kinds of chuckleheads who make up the truculently uninformed. For some reason, America seems to be chock-a-block with these critters.

And, to be honest, dear reader, we find them almost as scary as a Muslim with 1,256 cellular telephones and a job at Heathrow. We mean, come on: How unhinged do you have to be to spout radical slogans whilst not even bothering to read a daily paper? After all, if you’re getting all your “news” from “The Colbert Report,” you might as well not vote.

It doesn’t make any sense. If you ask us, the blithely uninformed ought to have moderate opinions—or, failing that, no opinions at all. Yet sometimes, dear reader, this seems not to be the case.

Quite often this leads to rather bizarre and irksome conversations. Your ill-informed Green Party devotee will lean over to you and say, “I just don’t understand why radical Muslims would attack Canada—they never sent any troops to Iraq.”

At this moment, you don’t know whether to ignore this dolt or trouble yourself with formulating a reply. After all, you’d have to discuss the history of pre-Iraq War Islamic terrorism, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia’s massive funding for anti-Western propaganda, blah, blah, blah. And then, of course, you’d have to suggest that your pal remove his radical bumper stickers from his car, since he’s officially too stupid to sport such vehicular eyesores.

It simply may not be worth the effort. Especially if you have to use the can. If a non-Muslim Westerner seems more critical of the USA than of Hezbollah, you are highly unlikely to convince him of anything, since he’s clearly demonstrated that his views are a mite insane.

So the next time an acquaintance of yours dons a Che Guevara T-shirt and then demonstrates that he doesn’t know the first thing about him, you may want to take some drastic measures. Like forced sterilization. Hey, at least he won’t have moronically opinionated kids to bother you.