What's up Wisecrack, Jared here, and today we’re talking about everyone’s favorite
president: Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. When Idiocracy was released in 2006,
Fox allegedly tried to bury it. Apparently they was worried sponsors might be upset at,
say, this, "Carl's Jr. F*** you, I'm Eating." Despite their efforts, Idiocracy has become
a cult classic. People not only love the film for it’s amazing toilet humor, but for its
political prescience. Idiocracy is perhaps less known as the story of unwitting time
traveler Joe Bauers trying to get back to 2005, and more as a cultural artifact that
embodies what some see as society’s gradual degeneration.
In Idiocracy’s America, a pro-wrestler becomes president, politics has devolved into shouting
matches, "I got a solution, you're a dick!" people gamble for healthcare, corporations
pretend to care about you, "Welcome to Costco, I love you." And most tragic of all, everyone’s
forgotten the word for tortillas, “We running out of french fries and burrito coverings.
Yeah.”
Leading up to the 2016 election, one of the film’s screenwriter’s, Etan Cohen, first
said the film had become a documentary. Fast Company similarly noted that President Dwayne
Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho’s parallels to Trump are “undeniable.” With
fully automated fast food, Switzerland opening a fellatio cafe, and “Ow my balls” being
inoffensive when compared to anything Logan Paul has done, the similarities to our world
seem uncanny.
But just how prescient is it? Is Idiocracy as a lens to understand our current condition
missing the mark? Or did it really all come true? Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition
on Idiocracy: Deep or Dumb? And, as always, spoilers ahead.
Alright guys, first, a quick recap. In 2005, Joe Bauers is chosen for an army experiment
wherein he’ll be frozen for a year with sex worker Rita. But the officer overseeing
it gets arrested for some unscrupulous behavior, the base gets bulldozed, and Joe and Rita
remain in stasis for 500 years until a garbage avalanche unlocks their chambers. Joe discovers
the utter degradation of the world, as this once average man, "Remarkable, truly. The
most average person in our entire armed forces" is now surrounded by imbeciles. In addition
to mountains of trash that nobody knows what to do with, a sports drink called Brawndo
has filled America’s water fountains and irrigation systems, leading to a famine.
Also, retail HJs, porn, balls-kicking, and farts, seem to be the primary means of entertainment.
After an IQ test, the world discovers that Joe is the smartest man alive. So he’s appointed
Secretary of Interior by President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. The
first order of business? Fixing all these dying crops. When Joe suggests they water
the crops with H20 instead of Brawndo, Brawndo’s stock tanks, causing widespread unrest. Joe
is sent to rehabilitation, which is just a monster-truck execution with a few added pieces
of flair. But he survives long enough for the world see his plan succeed, become president,
and live happily ever after with Rita.
Like any good dystopia, Idiocracy is rooted in the the real world in which it was written.
Having been made during the Bush era, this film is saturated with jabs at Bush’s base
of supporters, especially the Southern part. There’s this swipe at Fox News, "Fox News!"
Language has become a mix of hillbilly and a few other undesirable dialects, "The english
language has deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley-girl, inner-city slang,
and various grunts." And their clothing, saturated with sponsors, resembles a nascar uniform.
That and judges and politicians appealing to people’s sense of folk wisdom invokes
the Texas governor who, unlike his opponents, seemed like a guy who you could have a beer
with.
So in the face of a president who was criticized for getting C’s in college, our first question
is, Was Mike Judge right about anti-intellectualism? Part 1, Anti-intellectualism.
Some people think Mike Judge’s vision of a world ruled by idiots has already come true.
Fake news rules social media and the US is breaking out in diseases cured half a century
ago. So is the problem that a culture hostile to learning has ruined the world? Judge was
acutely aware of the anti-intellectualism that existed in the early-aughts, currents
that still exist today. Idiocracy takes place in a world where Joe is repeatedly called
a f** for sounding smart, "I need help. There's that fag talk we talked about." Nobody can
count, "That'll be... this many dollars." Or read, "Rehabilitation? Why do you keep
trying to read that word?"
The justice system is a farce based on non-sensical appeals to common sense, "Prosecutor! Why
you think he done it? Okay, number one, your honor, just look at him." And criminal justice
resembles some combination of a gladiator fight with a monster truck rally. In other
words, Judge thought a bunch of illiterate yokels were ruining democracy and if we weren’t
careful, we’d end up with this.
But you could argue that illiterate yokels ruining democracy is anything but the truth.
Because today, we don’t live in an anti-intellectual environment, but a pseudo-intellectual one.
Here’s the difference. Anti-intellectualism, as many may have personally experienced, usually
involves people balking at those who read books, appreciate art, you get it. It’s
the world of Idiocracy. But psuedo-intellectualism is different. Psuedo-intellectualism involves
people gallivanting around, as if they appreciate scholarship and information, but are largely
full of shit.
Let’s go to one of my favorite punching bags: Flat Earthers. It’s not that Flat
Earthers are dumb-dumbs who never passed physics. On the contrary, if you dive deep into the
rabbit hole, and, I’m so sad that I have, Flat Earther websites are full of all the
makings of real arguments. They even bought a f***ing $20,000 laser gyroscope to prove
the Earth is flat. There’s evidence, complicated formulas about how gravity works in their
model, and appeals to rational logic to prove once and for all, that the spherists are the
true idiots.
And for every falsehood told, it takes so long to disprove. Where do you even start
with people rolling out flight plans and invoking the laws of special relativity. You could
say the same of anti-vaxxers, who tout their own MDs and scientific articles, even if they’ve
been debunked, as proof that we, the measle-less normies, are the true dumbasses. And as a
grim warning against what America could become, this line of thinking, especially popular
on the left, of the uneducated ruining everything, just doesn’t stack up.
Even Democrats, who accused people like the Tea-Party of being a bunch of illiterate country
bumpkins, "Well I’ve never seen no plants grow out of no toilet. Hey that’s good,
you sure you a'int the smartest guy on the world?" have to contend with the notion that,
in fact, they were wealthier and more educated than the general public. And the “woo woo”
new age bullshit popular among the left is similarly not because of a lack of education,
as we’ve seen how anti-vaxxerism can spread in hyper-educated places like Silicon Valley.
Despite the fact that many claim that “Idiocracy” has come true, our political discourse is
more “lively” than ever. Sure, much of it involves bullshit and deranged anger, but
it’s not the aversion to logic and information, it’s the embracing of a different kind.
An arguably, way, way worse kind. So while Joe may yearn for the days when people read,
"And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for f**s,
and neither was writing!” it’s not quite the solution.
It’s not that we don’t appreciate knowledge, we just don’t agree on how to evaluate knowledge.
So on anti-intellectualism, Mike Judge’s take is certainly funny. But it’s maybe
not nearly as prophetic as some would like to think. Which brings us to a specific brand
of psuedo-science: Part 2, Too Many Babies.
In Idiocracy, there’s a specific theory on how the world got to be so messed up. Dumb,
irresponsible people have tons of dumb, irresponsible kids at rates that vastly exceeds that of
your “upstanding” citizens. "There's no way we could have a child now. Not with the
market the way it is, no. That just wouldn't make any sense." With no natural selection,
the general populace will continually get dumber until, well, this "And the number one
movie in the country was called, Ass.
This very idea was explored by Henry Herbert Goddard, in his hugely influential book, The
Kallikak Family. Goddard’s book studied the family of one pseudonymously named Deborah
Kallikak, and how her family begat generations of idiots. He traced it back to one upstanding
revolutionary soldier, who had a fling with a tavern girl that resulted in the spawning
of scores of moral degenerates. "I got too many damn kids, I thought you was on the pill
or some shit. Hell no!"
Meanwhile, said soldier, Martin Kallikak, went on to marry a nice Quaker girl and begat
a long-line of upstanding citizens. Goddard’s chart even resembles the family tree of Idiocracy,
with the “bad” people outnumbering the “good" people. Goddard’s work was grounded
in the idea of “feeble-mindedness,” he even coined the term “moron.” The idea
was simple, feeble-mindedness was spreading like a disease, and it needed to be stopped.
"I’m gonna fuck all y’all. That’s my boy!" Or else we might get something like
this, "Was I wearing pants when we went in there? S***, what do I look like, a pants
goblin?"
Goddard didn’t invent a movement, but he certainly popularized it, it was called Eugenics.
Goddard’s method was riddled with errors and inaccuracies. He later renounced his work,
but the Eugenics movement spread like wildfire based on now debunked ideas about genetics,
forced sterilization programs started popping up across America. It even resulted in a Supreme
Court case, where the court not only upheld a sterilization law, but commented to the
plaintiff that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
So, you know, the opposite of this, "Clevon is lucky to be alive, he attempted to jump
a jet ski from a lake into a swimming pool, and impaled his crotch on an iron gate. But,
thanks to recent advances in Stem Cell research, and the fine work of doctors Krensky and Altshuler,
Clevon should gain full reproductive function. Get your hands off my junk!"
Mike Judge has specifically addressed this criticism of Idiocracy, that it’s pro-eugenics,
by saying this: “To me, I thought the opening made it very clear that whatever side you
take, nature and nurture are both covered in that. That guy is clearly not a good father,
I mean, there’s a kid with a motorcycle in the front yard, and no one’s paying attention
to this. He’s just irresponsibly knocking up different woman, and proud of it. It’s
not like he’s a good, upstanding role model for the kid. So I think it’s pretty clear
here that, whichever one it is, nature or nurture, there’s some combination of both.
I obviously don’t believe in eugenics.”
Despite his qualification on the intro to the movie, dumb people having kids is not
making the world dumber. While Idiocracy shows the chart of IQ scores declining, the opposite
is true, IQ scores have been increasing on average by 3 points every year. In other words,
if Joe actually took an IQ test in 500 years, he’d be dumb as shit. And so would I. And
so would you. Dumbass. "For the smartest guy in the world, you're pretty dumb sometimes."
For a more asinine example of our rising standards, consider the White House party scene. You
might think that this is a sign that the White House has deteriorated so thoroughly as to
turn into a rager, but this is exactly what happened after the first inauguration of Andrew
Jackson. After a mass of 20,000 people descended on the White House to meet the new president,
they wreaked havoc inside until the staff set up bathtubs full of booze on the White
House lawn to draw people out. Overall, we can label some of Judge’s critique as the
common refrain of “cultural deterioration.” Language is getting worse, cinema is getting
worse, TV is getting worse, and it’s the end of the world
But it’s an old complaint, and one that’s never really true. Theodor Adorno complained
that Jazz was the death of good music, and people will never, ever, stop complaining
about how the youths are ruining language. In the preface to his English dictionary in
1780, Thomas Sheridan complained that nobody gave two s***s about how to pronounce words
properly anymore. And similar complaints can be found throughout recorded history. But,
let’s not forget it’s the so-called “deterioration” of language that makes new languages - otherwise
half of Europe would still be speaking Latin, or Proto-German, not French, English, Spanish
or Italian. Still, we can all hope that Fudruckers rebrands as “Buttfuckers”.
So on the question of “will the world get dumb?” - we got to say Judge's answer is
kind of dumb. But let’s talk about what Idiocracy might have gotten right. Part 3,
Corporate Culture and Spectacle.
One of Judge’s observations that is certainly not disappearing anytime soon is the infiltration
of corporate culture into our personal lives. There’s the aforementioned "Welcome to Costco,
I love you." which seems only a few degrees separated from corporate Twitter accounts
who act like real people who are prone to depression. Characters are named after brands,
like Frito, Dr. Lexus, Formica, Velveeta, Hormel, and President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain
Dew Herbert Camacho. And one must only imagine that Beef Supreme is some unreleased taco
bell masterpiece.
Speaking of Taco Bell, they’ve possibly merged with AOL and the US Government, or
at least teamed up to provide long distance phone service "Welcome to AOL, Time Warner,
Taco Bell, US Government Long distance. Please say the name of the person you wish to call."
Carl’s Jr. is able to take custody of children, "You are an unfit mother. Your children will
be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr." and The House of Representin’ in sponsored by
“Uhmerican EXXXPress.” Now whether that’s a credit card company, or an HJ provider,
we’ll never know.
Mike Judge certainly wasn’t inventing this out of thin air. While corporate lobbying
goes back to at least the 18th century, the election of a Vice President who was formerly
CEO of an oil company brought new fears of corporate influence on American politics.
Which makes scenes like this so perfect, "I'm the Secretary of state, brought to you by
Carl’s Jr. Why do you keep saying that? Because they pay me every time I do." This
didn’t start or end with Dick Cheney. Obama’s list of economic advisors read like a “who’s
who” of Goldman Sachs alumni and more famously, everyone’s mad at this dude from Verizon
for trying to kill Net Neutrality as chair of the FCC.
Idiocracy imagines a sports drink company buying the FDA and FCC, which allows them
to push forward their agenda of watering crops with Brawndo. This isn’t so much a prophecy
as it is on-the-nose hyperbole about how politics already works. And with the rise of branded”
content, where an airline company might pay Buzzfeed to write an article about “10 Must-See
Travel Destinations” - this distinction between public discourse and private companies
is increasingly diminishing. And nobody can escape it.
This ever-decreasing gap seems to have led to another problem: The spectacle-ization
of politics. Corporations, media and government have created a grotesque Frankenstein where
only sex and violence can capture the public imagination. And we probably don’t need
to beat a dead horse to tell you this, this, and this "I don’t know what the secretary
of interior even is." is basically true.
So is Idiocracy Deep or Dumb? Well, it’s definitely a hilarious snapshot of early 2000's
paranoia about where the world is headed. But it’s paranoia that’s slightly misdirected,
at least, some of the time. Regardless, it beautifully functions as a cautionary tale
of what happens when people cede their ability to think critically and just become mindless
consumers, "But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes."
And for that, we will always love it. Thanks for watching guys! Peace!