Idiocracy - not just a movie....

When I initially made the impulse grab which added "Idiocracy" to the handful of movies I was bringing home, I thought it was another silly, yet entertaining movie along the lines of "Mom and Dad Save the World."

I was right, and wrong. There seemed to be a lot of truth to this movie. The future society in this movie had become, well, ignoramuses. Everything they did was based on some form of self gratification - watching TV, monster truck competitions, and sex. The populous had forgotten how to care for themselves, the government was barely functioning, and what was left of industry existed by convincing people, through advertising, that their product was the best for them. and the population believed it.

One glowing example of this was for a sport drink, that claimed to be better than water, and even had "electrolytes." When Luke Wilson, the main character who has awoke in this future after several hundred years in a suspended sleep, asks one person what electrolytes are, the response is a statement taken from the company's commercial. Nobody knows what electrolytes are, but they've been told they're good, so they accept it.

The acceptance of the goodness of this sport drink is so widespread, that farms are failing because water has been replaced by it. "It has electrolytes!" In fact, water is ONLY used to flush the toilet.

A few blogs back, I talked about a conversation I overheard in a supermarket, where a young man was expounding on the history of banana importation into the United States, based solely on his revelation while watching a Three Stooges movie. I was reminded of the conversation while watching Idiocracy. It was then that I realized how much truth this movie really contained. I realized that Idiocracy was already creeping into our society, and had been for some time.

You see this in politics, and it's pundits. Who needs facts, if the statement being made will incite people to rally behind your cause? Take, for instance, an event around the Grand Canyon. Jeff Ruch, executive director of a group called PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) has decided to make an issue over a book that is sold in the National Park Services bookstores, which is contrary to his beliefs. Many followed his crusade, including the publisher of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer.

Mr. Shermer dutifully picked up on Mr. Ruch's rant, and made a show of support on his website, making a point of Mr. Ruch's claim that the NPS was being gagged by the Bush government. Reaching even further, Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury cartoonist, seize's this opportunity, and includes this information in his Jan. 13th cartoon strip.

The problem here is Mr. Ruch's is wrong. Once Michael Shermer started looking into PEER's claims in their original press release, he found that Mr. Ruch's had fabricated a few things. On Jan 17th, Mr. Shermer published an update to his Jan. 10th article. In "Fact Checking 101," he goes through the allegations made by PEER, and what he found the the truth to really be. He admits that he was fooled, and credits his followers for alerting him to the truth.

Gene Weingarten, in his Oct. 22nd, 2006 Washington Post Magazine story about Garry Trudeau, makes the observation "When he (Trudeau) reads a book, he edits in the margins, correcting errors of grammar, syntax or cloudy thinking." Will Mr. Trudeau follow in Mr. Shermer's footsteps, and make a correction for the "cloudy thinking" that he was fooled into following, and subsequently passed on to his readers? A quick internet search shows many have been deceived by PEER's allegations, but few have actually tried to find the truth.

Idiocracy. It's here, and it's real.