The world descends into idiocy, but it’s not as funny as a couple of movies from the past. From Robert E. Wright at aier.org:
The title comes from the two movies reviewed below, Idiocracy (2006) and Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story (2015). In normal times, neither would merit mention, much less review, at such a late date. But unless you are just coming off six months on a trapline in Alaska, you know that these are abnormal times.
I couldn’t decide which movie better fits our current situation but then it dawned on me that they are mutually reinforcing, not exclusive.
Idiocracy stars Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, and Terry Crews. In 2005, soldier Wilson and prostitute Rudolph agree to be cryogenically frozen for a year but through a series of mishaps end up sleeping for 500 years. They awaken to a dystopia where selective pressures have rendered humans dumb and dumber. Americans live surrounded by mountains of trash, watching trash on television, including shows like “Oww My Balls” that make Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass franchise look like high culture.
POTUS Crews and his fellow Americans speak in a pidgin of grunts and rural, urban, and Valley Girl slang that sounds eerily familiar. Unlike our presidents to date, though, he fires a machine gun, Al Pacino-style, for rhetorical emphasis.
