Nobody's That Stupid ...Right?
So, now we're all sitting and waiting for the first illnesses and fatalities to come in on people who have injected or ingested Lysol and Clorox as a way of preventing or curing the coronavirus.
Yesterday, President Trump said at his daily propaganda rally posing as a coronavirus press conference, "I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that." He turned to Dr. Deborah Birx. She just sat there and blushed.
The Washington Post reported, "The question, which Trump offered unprompted, immediately spurred doctors, lawmakers and the makers of Lysol to respond with incredulity and warnings against injecting or otherwise ingesting disinfectants, which are highly toxic."
"My concern is that people will die. People will think this is a good idea," Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told the Post. "This is not willy-nilly, off-the-cuff, maybe-this-will-work advice. This is dangerous."
Yes. These are the times in which we live.
If you haven't seen it, watch the 2006 movie, Idiocracy. It's a good way to blow a couple of hours during this drawn-out internal exile we all find ourselves in.
The movie begins with a narrator informing us:
As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
The protagonist, Private Joe Bauers, is a mediocrity who is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakes in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive.
Nobody in the film takes to quaffing or mainlining household disinfectants. No. We've become dumber than that.
In fact, the dumbassedness from this administration is coming at us so fast and furious, I wasn't able to include Trump's Jonestown 2.0 scenario in my piece yesterday in Washington Monthly -
The Republicans’ Disdain for Science Has Endangered Us All. I discuss how Americans' recurrent obsession with anti-intellectualism could lead us to our demise as a great nation.
We - well around 42 percent of us anyway - have, in fact, become so dumbed down that sock puppet protesters, funded and organized by cynical Trumpster plutocrats, are demonstrating in cities demanding the freedom to be infected and die from COVID-19, their right under Amendment 2.5 of the Constitution, I guess.
How dumb is that?
Now, there are some of us who are going, "Hmm. Now there's an idea. The Rapture finally cometh (for the chosen 42 percent, that is). Shit. Let them have their way! In time for November 3, no less." I won't say that I'm one of them. But I ain't sayin' the contrary either.
Worse yet, governors in our most benighted states are either refusing to impose social distancing, or are lifting restrictions.
How Dumb is that?
Another entertainment production I highly recommend is HBO's Newsroom. In it, actor Jeff Daniels, playing a journalist, tells a young co-ed who robotically recites the ritual "America is the greatest country" patrioclamation:
And you—sorority girl—yeah—just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies. None of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about?! Yosemite?!!!
Indeed, Americans seem to be proud of their profound ignorance about their own nation's history, constitution and political make-up.
When Newsweek asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America's official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn't name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn't correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn't even circle Independence Day on a calendar.
A 2019 survey found that “more Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’ than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” More than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place, and “half believed the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation or the War of 1812 were before the American Revolution.”
It gets better.
A recent National Geographic survey indicates that merely 37 percent of recent college graduates can identify Iraq on a map, most failed to identify North Korea, only one in four could identify Iran or Israel, and among Americans ages 18 to 24, 6 percent could not even point to the United States.
How dumb is that?
As we await the first headline, "26 in Georgia Die from Drinking Laundry Bleach to Ward Off COVID-19," let us recall that quote from wise old Ben Franklin, "We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."