What The Hell Happened to Us?

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I seem to remember a time where Americans celebrated achievements of the mind.

We are, after all, the country that gave birth to the telephone, the television. the light bulb, the phonograph, the airplane, even the bloody space shuttle.

We're the country of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. We're the country of Kurt Vonnegut and Will Rogers.

Within the last few decades, though, we seem to have taken an about face on the intellectual parade route, taking a sharp turn into the Bataan death march toward a Darwinian dead-end of cerebral stagnation.

We went from living in a society where we were driven to send a man to the moon because no one had done it before to being a nation where being called a "brainiac" is actually considered an insult.

Now, I don't pretend to have any idea what brought about this pathetic state of mindless, but it has been a steady downhill charge for almost as long as I can remember (which, given the current state of our country, is becoming a shorter and shorter period of time). It may have something to do with our media outlets (not just news, mind you, but everything.) We've been getting a stream of entertainment coming to us playing to the lowest common denominator, which just keeps getting lower and lower.

Blue Collar Comedy? What the fuck is this all about? These are people who are getting paid to tell fart jokes and it's one of the most popular comedic phenomena in years.

Nascar? A bunch of guys driving around in circles very fast. This is about as intellectually stimulating as watching lead paint flake off into your morning cereal.

With all of this going on, I suppose it should be no surprise that we would eventually elect one of the Three Stooges as our president.


I'm just dumbfounded by the fact that we chose Shemp.