In the event you haven’t subscribed:"I’ve been working on a Unified Field Theory of Stupidity. My hypothesis: Stupidity dominates in our time because of the convergence of many seemingly unrelated elements that—mixed together at one moment, in one cultural beaker—have produced a fatal explosion of brainlessness. What are those ingredients? You will have your own list, of course. My nominees will seem eccentric at first. The subversion of manners and authority (two great casualties of the 1960s) prepared the way for the death of privacy, which would eventually be ensured by the stupendously intrusive capabilities of Big Tech in the 21st century. Manners (and in a different way, authority) depend on respect for the privacy of others, as well as one’s own. Manners depend on reticence, even mystery. When those ingrained regulations, those protections of the individual mind, are gone, then you may open the floodgates to (among many other things) pornography, which is a massively lucrative assault on individual dignity and collective decorum—an assault on the manners of a society and, if you will forgive my saying so, on the divinity of the individual.
The death of manners and privacy, I argue, are profoundly political facts that, combined with other facts, lead, eventually, to an entire civilization of stupidity. It’s a short ride from stupidity to madness. Soon people aren’t quite people anymore; they are cartoons and categories. And “identities.” The media grow feral. Genitals became weirdly public issues; the sexes subdivide into 100 genders. Ideologues extract sunbeams from cucumbers. They engage in what amounts to an Oedipal rebellion against reality itself."
The slow-motion zombies’ assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a fittingly stupid finale to the Trump years, which offered dueling stupidities: Buy one, get one free. The political parties became locked in a four-year drama of hysteria and mutually demeaning abuse. Every buffoonery of the president and his people was answered by an idiocy from the other side, which in its own style was just as sinister and just as clownish.
Cable news provided the Greek chorus. American government and politics became cartoons. The Democrats, all unknowing, played Wile E. Coyote to Mr. Trump’s Road Runner. Twice, the Democrats’ Acme Impeachment Committee rigged up the big bomb (heh heh), lit the fuse and held its ears. Both times, the Road Runner sped away. Beep beep!
“Trump is crazy!” “Trump is Hitler!” “Trump is a Russian agent!” “ Bob Mueller has the goods!” Beep beep!