Sunday, February 24, 2008


Danny has been trying to talk me into watching this movie, called Idiocracy, for months. I said, it sounded dumb. (Get it?!) Finally, tonight being Saturday night, with the usual lack of anything watchable on TV, I agreed. The film, a very broad satire on the dumbing down of America (although it is set five hundred years into what I sincerely hope won't be our future) has become a cult favorite since it's release last year. It is absolutely hysterical. The movie starts out with a very funny comparison between a a couple with IQs of 138 and 141 who have no offspring and a man called Cletus who makes Larry the cable Guy look really brainy and who constantly reproduces with any number of women who have never heard of birth control and couldn't spell the words without help. The film narrator talks about how many decendents Cletus has and the trends in America towards...well less intelligent people being more fertile. Then, we jump to the main plot.

Imagine a very ordinary "Average Joe"(Luke Wilson) who has made it his mantra when superiors say, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way", to always get out of the way. Hapless Joe is frozen by the military in an experiment gone awry with a prostitute (who Joe thinks is an artist) who has been tagged as the most ordinary and expendable woman in America and wakes up into a nightmare society of the future where an IQ of 80 would be genius. The citizens of this America speak a language mix of black street slang, Hispanic gang talk, and Valley Speak. Poor Joe, renamed by a Computer as Not Sure, only wants to find a Time machine to send him home, but on an IQ test he answers this question correctly when those around him can't: If you have a bottle with two gallons of liquid in it and a bottle with five gallons in it, how many bottles do you have?

Eventually, Not Sure finds himself in the President's cabinet as minister of the interior and...well, I'm not going to tell you the rest of the story. It really is funny though. I hooted and hollered.

Afterwards I was glad it was just a movie...but then I saw a comment by a real woman posted on the internet that stopped me in my tracks. The woman, nameless here, said that she likes to shop in the dollar stores," because I don't have to get all dressed up like when I go to the Wall mart." Was she kidding? What about the people Jay Leno interviews? They seem real enough, too. I won't even mention Washington DC. Maybe we should be afraid. Very afraid.

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