Forum / On The Conventional Wisdom Regarding Mike Judge's 2006 Movie' Idiocracy'

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    Chris Okum
    Nov 29, 05:59pm

    Anyone who thinks 'Idiocracy' predicted the future or is a comedy that with the passage of time has become a documentary is as idiotic as the people in the movie. Science Fiction movies are never about the future, they are always about the present time during which the movie was made, and 'Idiocracy' is a perfect reflection of the American body politic circa the mid-2000s. I know some of you have already forgotten this because you're prone to historical amnesia just like everyone else in this country, but by 2006 we had already elected George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to be President twice. Do you remember these two? W. was a typical smug, failson, Born Again moron, and Cheney was as venal and corrupt and soulless a politician as the United States has ever produced. Put the two of them together and what do you get? Something like Donald Trump, just as Donald Trump will beget the next media-literate confidence man who bluffs and lies and bribes and preens his way to the highest office in the land. Because Americans have always been this stupid. See, we've already been through this before, already confirmed that as a citizenry we are barely sentient, that we have no problem letting people you wouldn't hire to run a Subway franchise run the country right into the ground. You know why? Because it's too much work and not really that much fun to turn off 'Fear Factor' and 'American Idol' (or, to put it in more contemporary terms, put down your phone and stop staring like a retard at the other retards doing retard things) and crack a fucking history book every once in a while, like, an actual history book written by, oh, I don't know, maybe an actual academic, like someone who works in the history department of an accredited four-year university (ooh, I'm such an elitist fag aren't I?), a book that wasn't written by some former personal trainer at Equinox who believes flying lizard men in sunglasses visited the Egyptians and were the ones who really built the pyramids using interplanetary stone and mortar technology. Oh, but no, 'Idiocracy' wasn't about Americans 20 years ago, right? Because Americans 20 years ago were so much more enlightened than the homunculi who roam the landscape now. Sure, okay. Mike Judge didn't look into a crystal ball when he made this movie, he just looked out his window. 'Idiocracy' isn't about some point in the future we've only now just arrived at; 'Idiocracy' is about every point on the timeline since those skanks and crooks and religious loons from England crashed into Plymouth Rock.

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    David Ackley
    Nov 30, 05:07pm

    Religious loons? Please, do not malign such as the great fount of wisdom Cotton Mather, who dominated discourse in our civilization for a good part of the 17th century and wrote to his followers that the 'wilderness,' beyond the unpaved streets of Boston was the literal domain of the Devil, populated by his hench-devils the wild Indians.

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    David Ackley
    Dec 01, 03:23pm

    It's often mis-proclaimed that the Puritans came to these shores in search of 'religious freedom'. But historical clarity reveals that they'd had plenty of freedom in the Netherlands where they'd emigrated from England just as did the other religious sects. No they came to North America to establish a religious theocracy, a place where theirs was the one and only governing ideology, and where they were free to exile dissenters, burn heretics, and anathematize via slaughter as necessary the pagan original inhabitants. Hawthorne is a good guide to what that was all about, and the legacy of intolerance that is part of our inheritance and which we have yet to come to terms with.

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    Chris Okum
    Dec 01, 08:37pm

    They're about as close to establishing their Kingdom of Heaven as they've ever been. They have weapons and surveillance technology that the Puritans would have sold their souls for. People have no idea how close we are to living in an actual nightmare. I always recommend to everyone that they read the 2006 book, 'The Politics of Heaven,' by journalist Earl Shorris. He wrote the book right before he passed away, so I think he didn't care what anyone thought about what his thesis, which is that Evangelical Christians are going to actually try and usher in the Apocalypse to punish the secular world for the last 400 years of history. This book was written almost 20 years and it was spot on in laying out what kind of world we are currently living in, and, like Mike Judge, he didn't have to project into the future to do so, because all the evidence was laid out neatly before him in the present tense.

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    Chris Okum
    Dec 01, 08:38pm

    Sorry for some of the garbled syntax above.

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    David Ackley
    Dec 02, 03:11pm

    Calvinism was and in ghostly outline remains the perfect model, licensing under the general rubric of late model Christianity, the accumulation of wealth and the persecution of dissent.

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