Brave New World

Tonight, Lee and I watched Idiocracy. The simple premise is that the average American is "frozen" and wakes up 500 years in the future. The time has not been kind - average intelligence has dropped to a degree where he is the smartest man alive by a wide margin. The whole movie is a satire (Satire (from Latin satira, "medley, dish of colourful fruits") is a technique used in drama, fiction, journalism, and occasionally in poetry, the graphic arts, the performing arts and other media. Although satire is usually witty, and often very funny, the purpose of satire is not primarily humor but criticism of an event, an individual or a group in a clever manner - Wikipedia). The premise, as presented in the first few minutes of the movie, is that the smarter and more educated people of America (and the world) tend to put off having kids and have fewer children in general, while your generally less intelligent, less educated population has more kids. Eventually, the world is populated by morons, who breed more morons who are even more moronic, who breed more moronic morons, etc. The end result is a society where the president is the ultimate fighting champion and the #1 porn star, and no one knows anything. One of the cabinet secretaries won a contest to earn his post; one is sponsored by Carl's Jr.; one is Mike Bolton from Office Space. Our average guy becomes a cabinet secretary, has some wacky adventures, and makes the world a little better place. The plot isn't as important as the satire - that for a culture as dependent on technology as we are, we know almost nothing about how it works or how to fix it. How many of you reading this could fix your computer should it break down? How do we teach medicine to students who don't pass mathematics? At what point does society start to suffer from what everyone seems to agree is a poor education system? It becomes a cycle - teachers don't know a subject well, so they don't teach it well, so the students don't learn it well, so those who become teachers can't teach it, etc. The scary thing is, and this is the whole point to a satire, nothing in the movie was all that out there. Yes, you can argue some with the premise and that intelligence isn't completely governed by genetics or environment (there are numerous examples of genius-level intellects coming from areas where formal education doesn't exist and from parents of at best average intelligence), but we are already experiencing a situation where our best and brightest aren't in the leadership of the country (no W jokes). Who is currently the governor of California? Who was the governor of Minnesota? I'm not saying anything bad about Ahhnold and Jesse "The Body" Ventura, specifically, but is it really that far a leap to see someone with absolutely no qualifications run for and achieve office simply because they're well known (assuming my two examples had qualifications to begin with)? It's all worth thinking about. Then again, I'll be dead, and this world will mean nothing.

We also watched Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which is quite the opposite in terms of intellectually thought-provoking. I've seen it now, that's about all I can say. And I'm really tired. More tomorrow.