Reverse the Stupid

I’ve become very worried of late that as a society we may be on the verge of winning a collective Darwin Award. You know, the circumstance by which we make ourselves extinct due to an act of extreme stupidity. The guy who strapped himself into a lawn chair tethered to a jillion helium balloons comes to mind. They found his body washed up in the surf a few weeks later. I know this is an extreme example, but it illustrates what could happen to all of us if something isn’t done soon.

Climate change, swine flu, al-qaeda, Dancing With the Stars, to name a few, are threats to mankind that pale in comparison to the epidemic of stupid that is sweeping across the nation. What makes this disease all the more dangerous is the fact that the higher the degree of stupid, the less awareness people have of it. There is even a name for this condition. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Stupid people go around making bad decisions and stupid choices, all the while thinking they know better than anyone else.
To paraphrase the line from The Sixth Sense, “I see dumb people, but they don’t know they’re dumb”.

Conversely, the other half of the DK effect says that most smart people don’t think they’re necessarily any smarter than anyone else. That’s why they leave important decisions to dumb people, like congress for example.

Now don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that I myself am immune to this malady. I’ve certainly made my share of confident wrong decisions. Like buying a Renault, getting a sub-prime re-fi, or letting an unlicensed contractor with a lowball bid re-roof my house. I could go on, but I’m not that stupid…

The good news is, I think I know what’s causing all this and possibly how to stop it and maybe even reverse the effects.

I call it “The Maggie May Conspiracy.”

In the late 1960’s the United States government developed a plan to control the citizenry of the country and eventually the whole world by reducing the collective IQ to that of a junior high school student. They did it by secretly implanting a chip that was reverse engineered from UFO technology (captured at Roswell) into each American under the guise of vaccinations. The chip was designed to lie dormant until a trigger activated it and began to reduce the IQ of each unknowing victim. In order to not raise suspicion, it had to react incrementally, lowering the IQ only 5 to 10 points at a time.

Then, in 1971 the trigger was created, the hit song Maggie May by Rod Stewart.
A team of government scientists worked tirelessly around the clock to come up with just the right balance of mind-numbing lyrics and annoyingly repetitive music so subtle yet so catchy that everyone who heard the first strains would be compelled to listen to the whole song, all the while being slowly and unwittingly stupefied. Like a viral pandemic the trigger became ubiquitous through mutation, such as Muzak, and TV and film soundtracks. Somehow, some way, every minute of every day, there is a version of Maggie May playing in someone’s ear.

We are at this very moment de-evolving into heavy-browed, knuckle-dragging, tree dwellers with an annoying song we can’t get out of our heads.

As brilliantly complicated as this diabolical plot is, there is a remedy that is equally brilliant in its simplicity. In order to counter the intelligence reduction, one must merely
recite the song title backwards three times in a row very loudly.

So, the next time you’re tempted to believe someone talking about death panels or WMD’s, or you’re about pick up a copy of the Enquirer, Globe, or Washington Times, or you’re about to watch an episode of The Hills, scream at the top of your lungs:
“Yam Eiggam, Yam Eiggam, Yam Eiggam!!!”

You will feel your intellect begin to expand almost immediately, and as you’re being carted off you will know for a fact how much smarter you are than those fools manhandling you.

Fine Obama Whine

In 2001 I was actually kind of glad that W won the election. How’s that for a crazy opening statement? It’s true. I was so sick and tired of the previous eight years of the constant bitching and whining by the Republicans about the Clinton administration, I thought that if Gore gets elected the whining would ramp up to such a horrible pitch that my head might literally explode. What a nasty mess that would be! Plus, I thought, how bad can W be? I mean the country is in pretty good shape, there’s a budget surplus for the first time since JFK, plenty of jobs, no wars. It could work, right?

Well for the first nine months every thing was pretty much ok. W looked like he was shaping up to be a pretty mediocre president, not a whole lot for either side to go nuts about. I had read “Fortunate Son” by J Hatfield so I figured he wasn’t going to be any kind of visionary or otherwise spectacular leader (as Al Franken said, “We elected the only guy in Texas who couldn’t find oil.”).

That didn’t matter much because the important thing is that the whining had stopped. Whew! My head did not explode and there would be no horrible bloody mess for my wife to clean up. As long as he didn’t get caught getting a bj in the oval office, I figured that the opposing ideological factions that existed in this country could return to a state of civility. You know, the kind where everybody works for the greater good.

We had taken a trip to Europe in April of that year and nearly every European we talked to thought we had shot ourselves in the foot as a country. “Probably” I said, “But listen… no whining.” Towards the end of our trip, on May 8th, after a long day of driving, we were watching euro TV in our provincial motel room and the only sound was cheering. Channel after euro channel of parades and re-enactments of American-loving V-E Day celebrations. Cheering is way nicer than whining.

Then of course 9/11 happened and for about ten minutes we were a country united against a common enemy. And then W stepped up from mediocrity and invaded the wrong country, fought a half-assed war in the right country, let Bin-Laden get away, gave sweetheart no-bid contracts to big oil companies, appointed incompetent cronies, ignored a hurricane, presided over the worst recession since the depression, and the list went on and on.

But the whining noise had already begun. First it was a cry of righteous anger about how our civil rights were being dismantled, habeas corpus being thrown out, lives being sacrificed, money being wasted, our leaders being caught lying to us on a mass scale. Soon however, those cries were drowned out by even more whining.

Question the President? That’s treasonous whaaa, whaaa. I want freedom fries whaa. The French won’t help us whaa, whaa. Either you’re with us or agin’ us whaa, whaa. It’s all Clinton’s fault whaa, whaa…
The pressure in my head began to build. I began researching places to live that had no access to media, TV, Internet, or other people. A cave in the Amazon jungle was starting to look pretty attractive.

I some how managed to survive the cacophonous noise that was very much like scraping your teeth along a chalkboard while sticking your hand into an commercial blender, all the way until 2008.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a new guy sprang onto the scene! A guy who was not a W or a W clone. He was an O as in hero, as in super hero. The O man was here to save the day!
He came from on high to rescue us from the evils, the villains, the Cheneys, the seventh circle of hell, and bring us all back onto the paths of righteousness.

This guy had it all. He was smart, honest, and handsome. He could speak in whole sentences. He could use multi-syllable words. He was a constutional scholar. He was altruistic yet pragmatic. I’ve got to vote for this guy I thought, he’s like a cross between JFK, Billy DeWilliams, and Gandhi!

Sadly, it wasn’t even three months after the inauguration when the shrill cries of contempt rose up like a chainsaw symphony. Oh the horrors! No birth certificate whaa, whaa! Not really American whaa, whaa! Death panels whaa, whaa. We want our country back whaa, whaa. He reads a teleprompter. He’s a grandma- and baby-killing Nazi-communist who wants to run General Motors whaa, whaa, whaa, whaa haaaa haaaa…

And if that wasn’t enough to make my ears bleed, the whining is now starting to come in stereo. Not just satisfied to perforate my right eardrum, the noise is also assaulting my left side. O is trying to do too much too soon whaa, whaa. He got the wrong kind of dog, he swatted a fly whaa, whaa. He hasn’t done anything, he hasn’t fixed eight years of stupid overnight whaa, whaa.

He can’t walk on water, he’s just a mere mortal human whaa, whaa, whaa!!!

Since Obamaman is less than a year into his term, I’m going to give him some room to work. He may not be Gandhi/Batman incarnate, but if you look at his record and the circumstances surrounding his ascension to the throne, he’s really done quite a lot.
I also think that the big O is working his strategy at a deliberate pace designed to have long-term success, and not just a quick fix.

Whether or not his policies work, there is still the danger that the whining will reach the kind of fever pitch that will make dogs howl and heads explode.

So I’m going to try to ride it out. But just in case, I’ll spread a tarp over the furniture and put earmuffs on the dogs.

Rush, Barnum, and The Rain Man

So by now you’ve probably seen or heard about Rush Limbaugh’s unrestricted 30-minute rant about President Obama on that paragon of news virtue, Fox News, this past Sunday.

And if you’re anything but a ditto head, you’re probably asking yourself (or anyone else within earshot) “What qualifies a thrice divorced, draft dodging college dropout, who’s never had a job in his life that took place outside of a radio booth, to pass judgment on the President of the United States?”

Actually, that’s the question I ask every time I hear an utterance from the great El Rushbo.

But the REAL question is why do we care? Because he’s a genius at making us care.

The fact Rush has little or no formal education has nothing to do with the phenomenon he has become, and rather than let the idea that he has no diversity in his work or life experiences be a hindrance, he has leveraged his ignorance to his great advantage. It makes it much easier for him to believe the things that he says. If he believes it, his audience believes it.

Witness Hannity and Beck who are also self- taught disc jockeys made good with cleverly crafted niche opinions. They don’t got to show you no stinking degrees. To Hannity’s credit, he does have carpentry experience he could fall back on.

No, qualification has no relevance here in the blurry lined world of punditry, news and entertainment. And certainly marital success has no place concerning ones expertise in politics, business, or opinion, (unless of course one is a marriage counselor or something).

Speaking of Rush’s three failed marriages, I’ve heard the term “beard” bandied about on the net quite a bit lately, which seems interesting given his alleged homophobia. But I digress. (Did you see what I just did there? I just inserted a baseless innuendo!)

The point is, Rush is quite a lot like another great American, PT Barnum. No, I’m not referring to the obvious, shopworn maxim “There’s a sucker born every minute.” I’m talking about the genius of Barnum’s ability to find a need and fill it, his ability to package himself as commerce dictated, and the gift of being the kind of self promoter that only comes along every hundred years or so.

That my friends is what it takes to be able to say whatever you want, about whomever you want, and ultimately getting a four hundred million dollar contract to do it. One must give the devil his due.

But… on second thought, owing to the fact that PT Barnum had a much more rounded career (Did you know that Barnum was elected to a two year term as a Connecticut legislator and the mayor of Bridgeport?), I think a comparison to the titular movie character Rain Man is far more apropos. If you recall, in the film Dustin Hoffman’s character was an idiot savant who lived in a world of his own. He was totally incapable in every aspect of his life except one thing. He was a genius at card counting. He had the gift of memorizing and manipulating any card deck in any casino.

Likewise Rush is a genius at only one thing: making us think about him. It doesn’t matter if we love him or hate him, as long as we’re thinking of him, he’s making the big money.

It doesn’t matter if we believe in him or care about his ideology. It doesn’t matter what we think of his qualifications, his ethics or his humanity. It really doesn’t matter that Rush probably doesn’t give a flying crap about what his audience thinks or feels about anything.

What matters is that Rush has the gift of manipulating an audience. That’s the gift that counts above all else when you live in a world where laissez-faire capitalism is the be-all and end-all of life.

All right, there is one other thing that matters… motivation.

People who are altruistic or at least have real ideological beliefs (whether I like them or not) take risks and run for office.

People who don’t, have radio shows…

Foxdogs

The thing is, I like cheeseburgers and I think that a lot of Americans do too.

Around where I live, I can walk three blocks in any direction and find a place that will sell me a cheeseburger and a coke. And that’s a lot like what the major news networks are about; they sell you cheeseburger and coke news.

Then one day, along comes a guy (let’s call him Rupert) who has an idea. “I’ll bet there are a lot of Americans who would like hotdog and root beer news!” he says, stroking his chin with a diabolical chuckle.

And he’s correct; I love a hotdog and a root beer once in a while. As it turns out, lots of Americans prefer hotdog and root beer news. Since Rupert’s the only one that sells that commodity, store for store he’s out-selling the others like gangbusters. That’s right, Foxdogs are number 1. There are a large number of people who only like Foxdogs. And then there are a bunch of folk who like them once in a while, for a change of pace.

But…since there are so many outlets like McCNNburger, Columbia Burgerking System, and Americanjack in the Boxcasting Company, burger news people like me needn’t feel threatened. There’s even something for the veggie burger crowd: MSNBCGardenburger (with TofuMaddow cheese).

The real puzzle here is, why are Foxdogs getting so upset for being labeled by the Whitecastle House for what the are? They are not McCNNburgers, they are Foxdogs. Why can’t they just be happy with what they are? Some times they try to sell us O’Reillydogs repackaged as Brit Humeburgers, but we’re not fooled. (They did try to sell those Bushpizzas for a few years but that just left a nasty taste in everyone’s mouth.)

So what? Foxdogs make a lot of money selling what they are selling. After all, isn’t that their goal? Why be ashamed of it? Instead of bitching about being called out for what they are, Der Beckwiener and the others should be happy with their fat market share.

And would it kill anybody to sell a taco once in a while?