Idiocracy

In Mike Judge's recent movie 'Idiocracy', only idiots reproduce, while smarter ones merely ponder the issue. Thus the morons inherit the earth. So the U. S. president is a pro- wrestler, the most popular movie is 'ASS' ( a filmed version of just that), and we all wile away our time watching car explosions a la Nascar and pondering eternal mysteries like why a square peg doesn't fit into a round hole.

But genetics aside, there are many other ways to be an idiot. Take a shortened attention span for instance. If you can only spend five seconds on a topic before bolting to the next diversion, you are autistic. But if all that useless diversion is in your warped minds eye 'productive', bolting from from one diversion to another and back again becomes multi-tasking, and from your multi-tasking ipod/phone/computer, you become a master of the universe, or rather, its minutia.

The grand idea of our current culture is that you can build profundity in a thirty second blurb, so the news becomes celebrity and crime, or better yet, celebrity criminals. Similarly, artists or 'idols' are made after five minutes training and discovered after a five minute performance, and psychologists and politicians are vaunted as experts by their ability to master a pithy phrase. What is more, our grandest inventions allow us to port over the glory of a distracted life to every minute of our lives!

So we become a functionally autistic, with the brains but not the attention span. And we don't have to wait for evolution to bring us there.

Thus, I hope you understand why I keep this post short.