caught bill maher from a week or two ago on the tivo last night. halfway through this clip is a conversation about how naive the american people are for buying all the crap that politicians shovel for them, and john mellencamp defends their right to be naive, saying, ‘they’re honest, and they believe that people are generally honest with them’.

this is SO horribly wrong-headed i wish they had discussed it more — i think bill maher was so flabbergasted he didn’t even know what to say other than ‘that’s crazy’. but defending general ignorance as an ideal of purity in good old fashioned folks is ridiculous. i can totally give him the idea that no one wants to live in a world where no one trusts anything that anyone tells them, but accepting everything at face value is totally ridiculous. there’s a difference between trusting everyone outright, which will just get you picked up by a guy in a van who says he wants to give you candy, and having the basic mechanism of deciding who deserves your trust before believing what they want you to believe in their political speeches. as bill retorts, ‘there’s something to telling people, “be more cynical. it’s better than going through life swindled.”‘