It seems contemporary America has taken a turn to the dumb side.

Declining literacy, not only in reading, but in history and geography, a growing dependence on the digital world, cell phones and portable music players, radio and TV programming devoted to bad taste and insult humor, politics of partisanship and anger and an assault on mainstream science by powerful religious forces are today's leading concerns. Examples:

When questions about his Roman Catholic religion arose during the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy said, "I do not speak for my church on public matters and the church does not speak for me."

Contrast that stand with the belief of current U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who suggested that Catholics holding public office should resign if faced with upholding policies that contradict church doctrine.

Compare past presidents who promoted scientific advances with President Bush who endorsed the teaching of creationism in the public schools.

When I was a high school freshman in 1961, I was required to memorize the Bill of Rights. A recent survey found that many Americans have no idea of the rights guaranteed them under the First Amendment alone.

"... America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism" is the argument of Susan Jacoby's new book in which she discusses those above concerns.

Jacoby says she was inspired by the 1963 social history, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" by Richard Hofstadter.

That book remains one of the clearest and most careful arguments about why this great democracy has traditionally sought to level its citizenry through a mass culture that rejects the open pursuit of ideas, rational thought, high art and music because it's "elitist." (Ironically, honest intellectualism is about as democratic as you can get.)

While Hofstadter, a historian at Columbia University, examined America's past, Jacoby, a onetime contributor to Cosmopolitan magazine and author of "Freethinkers," stresses contemporary scenes in education, the media, religion and politics.

I've read Richard Hofstadter, Richard Hofstadter is a favorite of mine and Susan Jacoby is no Richard Hofstadter.

Where the historian was objective, she views the world through her own opinions and experiences. Where Hofstadter cites a wide range of sources, Jacoby relies mostly on the Internet and her own impressions, the very targets of her criticism.

In one field where I have some experience -- book reviewing in newspapers -- Jacoby indulges in the usual tongue-clucking and finger-wagging on the decline of coverage by quoting the blog of the National Book Critics Circle which has a vested interest in the health of the papers who pay for reviews.

She doesn't talk to book editors, publishers or readers, but confidently concludes that "newspaper publishers are betting that boomer readers ... will not miss book reviews and classical music criticism any more than readers ... in their twenties and thirties."

Jacoby launches her book buoyed by the example of Hofstadter with objectivity and research. She writes an organized, researched overview of the country's history of education, intellectuals in society and religion.

It's when Jacoby reaches the present era that she falls back on personal anecdotes and impressions that slide into self-congratulation.

To trumpet her own erudition, she tells us former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown "once wrote me a complimentary note about my use in an article of a Milton quote."

The passage from the English poet's epic, "Paradise Lost," however is meaningless without its context within that allegorical journey into 17th-century English politics. What the blind poet can add to Cosmo's regular features on sex, diet and hairstyles is something Jacoby won't tell us, however.

Inconsistency, insubstantial sourcing and the tendency to jump to conclusions based on flimsy evidence mar Jacoby's well-meaning, but self-absorbed bid to encourage Americans to seek a return to some vague golden age of knowledge and learning.

A worthy sequel to "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" reflecting this age remains unwritten.