Please, for the love of God, excise the eugenics from your heart
Gruesome Details
We are trapped in another spiral of the destruction of the American empire. As a result, Americans are trying to find their experience in media. What movies or TV remind me of the moment I am in? What reflects the pure stupidity and despair of my time?
Once again, people are citing Idiocracy. The people cannot get enough of saying they live/are experiencing/America is becoming Idiocracy. I beg you: find a different reflection of our moment. (For the record, mine is Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, but I digress.)
Idiocracy is a 2006 Mike Judge movie which shows an America that has been taken over by very stupid people. As the movie opens, a grave-voiced narrator intones, “Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater number than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man now began to favor different traits.” He ends by saying, “Evolution does not make moral judgments. Evolution does not necessarily reward that which is good or beautiful. It simply rewards those who reproduce the most.”
In the movie, the world and, more vitally, America has been dumbed down by a vast reproducing populace of braindead dum-dums. For reasons unknown to me personally, when bad things happen in the U.S. people love to say it is like Idiocracy.
Some of this, of course, is because the movie played on an infinite loop on Comedy Central from 2006 to 2012, and everyone I talk to is in their mid-to-late thirties. But some of it is because we are a nation of eugenicists. Idiocracy is a eugenicist movie and, whether or not we consciously agree, Americans believe in eugenics.
America’s love of eugenics comes straight from its founding. We come by it honestly, as powerful Americans and state actors have sought to create ideas of whiteness to justify cruel treatment of Native Americans and Black people. (And the disabled, Chinese people, Italians, Irish, Latinos, Japanese people, Jews, etc. etc. etc.) In order to draw these weird invisible lines, you need to create and nurture the idea of eugenics. You need to create a cultural consensus that genetic inferiority (1) exists and (2) can be “fixed.”
Hitler, once the world’s most famous eugenicist (many are trying to unseat him), got many of his ideas from the good ol’ U.S. of A, after all.
OK, you know all this. You are smart. Idiocracy is just a fun movie, a good representation of America’s resounding and reverberating foolishness, you say. But if you let the eugenics in, it will flower, proliferate, grow. Judge may not have intended to make a eugenicist film, but he did. And we should let it sit in the dustbin rather than dragging it out to explain how America’s wealthiest are stripping America for parts.
The United States is a diverse and vibrant nation filled with smart people. We do not have a stupidity problem. We have a class problem. We have a propaganda problem. And, if you keep citing Idiocracy, you’re helping to perpetuate our eugenicist problem.
For the love of God, rip the eugenics out at the roots. Don’t let it take hold in your heart. Even disguised as a joke.
(I will continue to bang this drum until I never have to hear about this mid-tier eugenicist movie again.)