The future is dumber than you think

Way back in 1974, when my father ran for governor of New York on the Free Libertarian (now just Libertarian) line and came in a ... err ... not-so-close fourth, his original campaign slogan was the somewhat inscrutable "Stamp Out Idiocracy." Inscribed on campaign buttons, it was a chuckle-inducer once readers bothered to puzzle it through.

So, when my parents came to visit their grandson this Christmas, and incidentally drop in on their son and daughter-in-law, my old man was intrigued to see that I'd rented a movie called Idiocracy for holiday viewing. A one-time campaign slogan skewering the powerful dumb-asses running the Empire State into the ground had been transformed into a satire of the dumb-ass population running American culture into the ground.

If you're not familiar with Idiocracy (a real possibility, since the studio reportedly sat on Mike Judge's movie for a year before releasing it, without any marketing push, to as few theaters as possible), it's about a lazy and no-so-bright soldier and an unlucky hooker frozen in the early 21st Century as part of a hibernation experiment. The experiment is supposed to last one year, but ... well ... scandal intervenes, the base is closed, the project is forgotten -- and the pair are revived only by accident 500 years in the future.

And what a future it is.

The stage for the rapid devolution of the world is set by an early sequence that contrasts a neurotic, high-achieving couple's indecision over having a child -- indecision that leads to the permanent removal of their genetic material from the breeding pool -- with the prolific fertility of bed-hopping trailer trash who produce successive generations of mouth-breathing spawn. The result, after centuries, is a world dominated by morons, where nothing quite works, clothing is covered in corporate logos, the most popular TV show is called, Ow, My Balls and the English language has degenerated to an amalgam of "hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang and various grunts."

I have to admit that Judge's scene-setting hit a little close to home. At 42, I'm chasing after the one toddler that my wife and I decided to have, and were able to have at this late date only after intrusive and expensive fertility treatments. Meanwhile, an ongoing topic of conversation in our house is the astonishing fecundity of the youngest, dumbest and most irresponsible of my wife's patients. To judge by the customers for her pediatric services, the next generation is primarily being spawned by unmarried sixteen-year-old high-school dropouts with no visible means of support and little interest in nurturing the annoying creatures who mysteriously pop out every nine months or so.

Idiocracy has been tentatively claimed as something of a political manifesto, but it's hard to wrap the movie in any ideological flag. Rather than conservative or liberal, it's proudly elitist. The movie bemoans crass popular culture, anti-intellectualism and the sexualization of everything (in the movie, coffee shops and tax preparers alike offer "full release" among their services). Rednecks get zapped, as do urban blacks, TV-addicted couch potatoes and anybody who has ever paid for the privilege of turning his body into a corporate billboard. It's easy to see Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley temporarily putting aside their long feud to sing the praises of the movie.

I'm not so critical of pop culture as Mike Judge, nor so worried about being swamped by trailer trash -- I suspect that dumb-ass fertility is nothing new, while the high-tech age may actually be improving reproductive opportunities for the smartest and geekiest among us. But, fundamentally, the movie makes the worthy point that popular and stupid is absolutely not better than unpopular and smart. That's a politically incorrect, anti-democratic point of view at the moment, but it's important and worth emphasizing.

My wife is a convert. After the movie ended, she turned to me and said, "We need to have more kids."

Oh no. The world will just have to risk getting a little dumber without me.

Incidentally, as for my father ... His campaign slogan might have referred to a slightly different kind of "idiocracy," but he thoroughly enjoyed the movie.