MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—Many Americans are tired of explaining things to idiots, particularly when the things in question are so painfully obvious, a new poll indicates. According to the poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, while millions have been vexed for some time by their failure to explain incredibly basic information to dolts, that frustration has now reached a breaking point. Of the many obvious things that people are sick and tired of trying to get through the skulls of stupid people, the fact that climate change will cause catastrophic habitat destruction and devastating extinctions tops the list, with a majority saying that they will no longer bother trying to explain this to cretins. Coming in a close second, statistical proof that gun control has reduced gun deaths in countries around the world is something that a significant number of those polled have given up attempting to break down for morons. Finally, a majority said that trying to make idiots understand why a flag that symbolizes bigotry and hatred has no business flying over a state capitol only makes the person attempting to explain this want to put his or her fist through a wall.
One of the aspects of America that most disturbs me is the devotion to the idea that the majority rules. It’s not that I don’t like democracy, but as Winston Churchill once said, it’s the worst form of government imaginable…except for every other system out there. American governance is too often a case of replacing “majority” with “lowest common denominator.” The tone and tenor of our public discourse are too often determined by the truly, deeply intellectually bereft and demagogues adept at manipulating such intellectual vacancy. We don’t get to discuss real issues…because those who believe they have something to add to the conversation are more often than not the very people who should remain silent. Better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt is a sound, sensible rule…one seldom followed by those who’d benefit most from it.
How else could one explain the ascent of Donald Trump than to attribute it to the millions of intellectually challenged Americans who vote with their gut? Or that evangelical Christians apparently believe The Donald is using secret hand gestures to demonstrate that he’s one of them? Or even those who believe that attacking Hillary Clinton’s hairstyles over the years should pass for cogent intellectual discourse? These are people who, as John Cleese once said, are too stupid to know how truly, deeply, irretrievably intellectually adrift they are. The problem with being intellectually challenged is that it comes with the profound absence of the self-awareness required to understand that one is, in fact, severely moronic.
The dumbing down of America is not the product of the hyperventilating Liberal Media. It’s real and it has serious implications (none of them good) for our future.
Those who believe President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho Donald Trump to be qualified to sit behind the big desk in the Oval Office are unwittingly and inexorably leading this country down the path to our new idiocracy.
Mama would be SO proud….
You might’ve met our fresh-faced, flower-child president and his weak-kneed Ivy League friends, but you haven’t met America….
You haven’t met the heartland or the people who will defend this nation with their bloody, calloused bare hands, if that’s what it takes.
You haven’t met the steelworkers and the hard-rock miners or the swamp folks in Cajun country who can wrestle a full-grown gator out of the water.
You haven’t met the farmers, the cowboys, the loggers and the truck drivers.
You don’t know the mountain men who live off the land or the brave cops who fight the good fight in the urban war zones.
I’m not one to question the patriotism of another American, but Charlie Daniels’ inane screed is indicative of the sort of arrogant ignorance and xenophobia rampant in this country. The peculiarly American penchant for looking down on the educated and intelligent as somehow soft and weak is one of our greatest collective weaknesses. We could consider how America could be a better member of the international community. We could think about how we might play better with other countries. Instead, the lowest common denominator celebrates their ignorance and density by denigrating those capable of running circles around them intellectually.
There are far too many chest-thumping, obtuse, self-righteous ‘Mericans who
deny the validity of climate change…despite the fact that 97% of scientists agree that global climate change is real, dangerous, and exacerbated by human activity.
cling tenaciously to the long-since disproven belief that vaccines cause autism.
continue to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that only “a good guy with a gun” can stop a “bad guy with a gun.”
believe one of the functions of government to be preventing transgender people from using public restrooms corresponding to the gender they identify as.
believe a self-promoting businessman who’s a serial liar, a misogynist, and a bully is the candidate most qualified to be President.
An optimist might look at the situation and believe that there’s hope for climbing out of this morass. The truth, however, is somewhat more depressing. It leaves little hope that those who are knowledgeable will triumph over those who are not only proud of their ignorance, but revel in it.
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, “Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.”
There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science have been infused into America’s political and social fabric. Famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
“[M]y ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” I can think of little that more adequately sums up the sorry state of American intellectual agility (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) than those sad, distressing words.
I could go on, but it’s like pissing into the wind. In the end, I’d only wind up soaked and stinking. America is a country capable of leading the world into the 21st century. We could create a world in which people are valued for who they are, not discriminated against for whom and how they choose to love. We could help solve so many of the world’s problems. Unfortunately, America is governed by the lowest common denominator and those who exploit the intellectually inflexible for their own self-aggrandizement.
My fear is that this election will finally and incontrovertibly prove that Idiocracy wasn’t a documentary; it was a very prescient- and intensely depressing- look into America’s future.
We should be better than this.
