Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

I wrote this in late 2013, early in the 5 year history of the old tumblr baseball heavy thing. No link but if you search claudecat17 and whatever, things come up… I must have been one of the first completely obscure and not connected to anything people to have speculated publicly about the dumbness of the people around me. It’s not my worst effort…

I’ve been a big fan of the movie Idiocracy since I first saw it several years ago. I’m not even sure how I came across this satirical tale of an all too possible future. I know it wasn’t in a theater, and looking into the matter reveals that it wasn’t even really promoted or released to much fanfare back in 2006.

Not the kind of film that the advertising weasels wanted to cozy up to I suppose. Makes you wonder how The Simpsons has existed on the Fox Network for all these years.

For those unfamiliar with the film, it depicts a future in which humanity has, through entirely believable natural selection, devolved into a state of rampant anti-intellectualism, helped along by runaway commercialism and a near total control of government worldwide by corporations.

Sound familiar? Look around. Does it seem to you that smart people are coming close to their less than gifted brethren in gene pool contribution, to say nothing of sheer volume of offspring?

It’s a harrowing and all too believable world portrayed here. One in which skyscrapers built hundreds of years ago are precariously held upright by what looks like baling twine, where garbage avalanches comprise key plot devices.

Technology has long since made thinking largely moot, only to be chugging along derelictly, maintaining functionality only through original design execution. Nobody knows how to fix things, only how to press picture buttons on the scary machines of the now long past.

It’s almost sad that Idiocracy is so damn funny. The way the degeneration of humanity is explained, in documentary style, is so completely believable, so compellingly factual, that the laughs seem to come at our own expense. Are we not witnessing this de-evolution daily?

The Jerry Springer/Oprah Winfrey-ization of at the very least America has been underway for decades now, and shows no signs of letting up. Once those Asian nations that can still do science and math succumb to the inevitable, will there be any hope left for the world?

Try to imagine a graph, plotting both professional wrestling (UFC nowadays too) popularity and the ability to, for example, use multi-syllabic words among society at large. Are you seeing it? Still think there’s hope?

We’re in a forest for the trees scenario right here, right now folks. The slow but relentless dumbing down of world culture is inexorably occurring, just at a pace so slow as to go unnoticed, to the delight of the one percenters everywhere. 

It’s like an Alzheimer’s sufferer’s tragic slide into complete dementia. If you’re around him or her daily, you barely notice the effects, maybe not at all until it’s far too late. But seen from further remove, it’s blatantly obvious.

Nope. Fewer and fewer human beings can be trusted to use a toaster or be left alone without a life alert device. Fewer every day, with every little chunk of our humanity and once taken for granted resourcefulness and grit being chipped away by the forces of greed, and by natural selection being so heavily influenced by an increasing emphasis on big boobs and dicks.

Remember when it wasn’t cool to make fun of smart people? When the word “geek” was used for smelly and gross circus performers rather than the guy or gal that might, against increasing odds, come up with a cure for ebola or cancer? When reality was what was physically around you and not a highly profitable and easy to produce television genre?

Remember books? Maps that didn’t talk to you in an antiseptic female voice? News that wasn’t highly skewed by whatever corporate entity owns the fryers that make the profits that allow news to even be a thing anymore, as a classy loss leader?

I guess I shouldn’t be so cynical. There still exist pockets of intelligence, true artistry and plain old craftsmanship. It’s just different now, the really good stuff less generally available without paying a premium, though even that’s disappearing. The internet offers hope I suppose, to a degree at least. But increasingly even the freedom and chaos that was once the web is becoming the domain of corporate lock-down of content.

The copyright laws on the books insure that profit can be squeezed from a given work for several generations of inbred weasels now, rather than just one. Plenty of Kardashian butt and dresses of debatable color to be seen and yokeled over, but fewer and fewer public domain lifters of the lowly from the muck and mire of ignorance, now with extra Krispitiness™.

I could really get on a soap box here (was that really a thing? why soap?), but I’ll close by getting back to the film at hand. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it highly. Where else are you gonna be able to laugh out loud at President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho firing an automatic weapon to quiet down congress?

This is a highly detailed and all too believable portrait of our future. And funny as hell, despite the tragedy being portrayed. Perhaps the cult audience that Idiocracy has found will someday save the world from itself. Stranger things have happened. Me? I’m just “not sure”.

So here’s the best part of the movie for me, and entirely plausible.