Dumbasses, or just my opinion...

I’ve heard that Presidentialmania (not the President but an incredible imitation, and if you remember this bit of Broadway puffery then you are older than you say you are) opened in Los Angeles the other night with a performance on the Tonight Show, said performance coming with all the smoke and mirrors that the low information voters have come to expect from the star of the show.  This, in turn, brings up an interesting question, or at least I think it’s interesting; you may take an entirely different view of the matter, which is only right, I think, it being a free country and all.  The question is this: when did dumbasses become so significant a voting bloc here in this our Great Republic that the non-somnambulatory portion of the body politic must endure the former junior senator from Illinois’ constant televised catering to their ignorance?  

That the dumbasses have been with us always is a fact of American political life; one need only remember the turn of the last century philosopher George Ade’s comment that “…the Plain People are worth dying for until you bunch them and give them the cold Once-Over, and then they impress the impartial Observer as being slightly Bovine, with a large Percentage of Vegetable Tissue. “  It seems that not much has changed since then. The only difference between then and now, as far as I can see, is that then almost everyone was a low information voter—they had no choice in the matter. Radio hadn’t gotten much beyond the Morse Code stage of broadcasting, the big city newspapers didn’t make much of a splash outside their own municipal ponds, and the small town papers were largely pastiches of wire service reports, the farm report, the church page, and the news that the town’s last surviving Civil War veteran had just died, the passage of time succeeding where Robert E. Lee had failed. People knew what was going on in their local little burgs, but getting the big picture was much harder to do.  Today, of course, there is no excuse for not getting the big picture.  We have gone from suffering from a dearth of information to being able to gorge ourselves on a surfeit of the stuff.  Given that, you have to wonder how and why there are still low information voters in this country. 

Actually, you don’t have to wonder too much.  The fact is that democracy, as a form of government, requires the citizenry to pay attention to what is going on around them and most people don’t want to bother.  Why bother keeping yourself informed when you can while away the hours chatting with friends on the social media sites or playing Angry Birds or getting the scoop on which Hollywood starlet is checking herself into rehab this month?  Thinking is hard, dammit, and a good many people would just as soon avoid it if they possibly can.  So why not get your news from late night comedy shows?  They’re on television, just like the news is, and they don’t make you think too hard, the way the news does, or rather, the way the news used to, because that might hurt your brain, which is not a good thing, no two ways about it, and they’re a lot funnier than the news ever was, no two ways about that, either. And that’s the way the Republic ends, folks, not with a bang but with a chuckle.

THE ANNALS OF FLIGHT, OR CHUCK YEAGER SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES: I like to watch TCM [Turner Classic Movies, for those of you without basic cable], first, because I like Hollywood movies from a time when Hollywood knew how to make movies that people wanted to watch, and secondly, to indulge my habit of taking characters from one movie and stuffing them into the movie I’m watching at the moment. This is a vile habit, akin to cracking your knuckles in front of your mother or breaking wind during the more solemn parts of a funeral, and it is a habit that makes it difficult to remember movie trivia, since I’m never sure if the factoid I am trying to dredge from the noisome sinkhole of my memory is something that actually occurs in a movie or whether it is something I made up. On the other hand, such a habit can make life interesting at times, as when you watch The Right Stuff and you start to wonder how the movie would turn out if Michael Corleone broke the sound barrier instead of Chuck Yeager. Certainly, the change of characters would have improved the quality of the cinematic cuisine; Gordo Cooper’s burned hot dogs are simply no match for Mama Corleone’s lasagna.

I suspect that the same guy who put a bullet through Moe Greene’s eye did the job on the sound barrier; no one else in The Godfather was anywhere near Edwards Air Force Base, and, let’s face it, the idea of Clemenza in the Bell X-1 rocket plane causes cognitive dissonance on a massive scale; there wouldn’t be enough room in that plane for Clemenza, the gun, or the cannoli. I also have a hard time imagining what the sound barrier could have done to the Corleone family that Michael would feel the need to have the barrier whacked in such a loud and grotesque manner; causing a sonic boom in front of a bunch of eyewitnesses, most of whom work for the government, is not particularly subtle, unless the lack of subtlety is the point of the exercise.

The barrier’s loud demise must have had something to do with the narcotics business, which Don Corleone did not want to get involved with, but this is just speculation on my part; everything I know about the mob I learned from the New York Daily News; but it’s what makes the most sense to me. If the sound barrier got mixed up with dirty cops and the Tattaglia family in the drug trade, then the hit on the barrier may have been simple justice, an example of someone who should have known better becoming involved in a dirty business and then getting what was coming to them. That’s a terrific story, or at least Tom Wolfe thought so, but then again, what do I know?