Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

There’s a long history of anti-intellectualism in American life, a point that the historian Richard Hofstadter seemed to be making in his 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

By elevating candidates who can entertain over those who can think, mass media have made the election of dunces more likely. Fact-free and nuance-intolerant, these human sound-bite machines have reduced our most complex problems to binary oppositions: us versus communists; us versus terrorists; and that latest crowd-pleaser, us versus scientists.

Just as a Stephen King novel might inspire you to bolt your doors, perhaps these political horror stories will rouse you to action.

The dictionary defines it as “the lack of knowledge, education or awareness.” That works for me, only I might add “the refusal to look things up in the dictionary.”

My preference that politicians be educated probably brands me as an elitist.

want the president of the United States to be intellectually curious for a simple reason: I think the person running the country should be smarter than I am.

To believe that Trump’s presidency came out of nowhere, without warning, is the political version of creationism. I, on the other hand, believe in devolution.

In this chapter, we’ll meet two men who traversed this minefield with wildly different results: the Goofus and Gallant of the Ridicule stage. Gallant is Ronald Reagan, whose talents distracted us from his ignorance. Goofus is Dan Quayle, whose ignorance distracted us from his talents. To this day, those talents remain unknown.

Reagan was more responsible for the rise of ignorance than for the fall of communism.

Today, more than four decades after he entered the White House and took his first nap, his disciples worship him like a prophet, an oracle, the Yoda of cluelessness.

Explaining why he wrote the book, Byrne says that he became frustrated by the widespread recognition Barack Obama received for his intellect, while Reagan’s big brain remained ignored. This slight was particularly galling, he argues, because Reagan was a far more original thinker than Obama. That’s true, in the way Dr. Oz is a far more original thinker than Dr. Stephen Hawking.

[M]ost Republican politicians… preserve some respect for the rights of the individual. Mr. Reagan does not: He opposes the right to abortion.”

Once he became the most powerful man in the world, his television-watching habits were, by all accounts, voracious.

“Eighty percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees.”

Watt called himself the nation’s “number one environmentalist,” which was like Napoleon calling himself Europe’s “number one pacifist.”

Byrne claims Reagan’s “greatest intellectual gift” was “his imagination.”

Reagan was such a fabulist that even a story about him making something up turned out to be made-up.

Reagan had every opportunity to become well-informed, but his extraordinary talent for closed-mindedness shielded him from unwanted enlightenment.

Reagan’s worshippers and detractors mostly agree on one point: he made the world a better place when he stopped making movies.

“A wind is blowing across this state of ours. And it is not only wind; it will grow into a tidal wave. And there will be a government with men as tall as mountains.”

The former TV pitchman infantilized the electorate by selling it simplistic solutions. “For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to the complex problems which are beyond our comprehension,” he said. “Well, the truth is, there are simple answers.”

“Governor Stevenson, you have the vote of all the thinking people.” His response: “That’s not enough, madam. I need a majority.”

Reagan demonstrated that, in the hands of a talented TV performer, one joke could sink a thousand facts. But he had enjoyed another advantage as he cruised to victory in 1980: an all-star roster of morally dubious advisers. His gang of goons included Roy Cohn, the disgraced former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and three hard-charging political consultants, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. It was hard to imagine another Republican presidential candidate assembling such a team, or coming up with a campaign slogan as winning as Reagan’s: “Let’s Make America Great Again.”

Frustrated by his aversion to reading, cabinet members resorted to bringing him up to speed—or, more accurately, half speed—by showing him videos and cartoons about the subjects at hand. But even these Oval Office versions of Schoolhouse Rock! bored Reagan, who spent briefings doodling.

Despite his reputation as a deficit hawk, he added more to the national debt than all previous presidents combined: it soared from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion on his watch.

As for the Strategic Defense Initiative, it cost American taxpayers $30 billion before the government figured out it didn’t work; in sci-fi movie terms, it was less Star Wars than Battlefield Earth. At least taxpayers could be assured that no future U.S. president would dare blow their precious taxes on an idiotic space force.

As much as Reagan celebrated his own laziness, that moral generosity did not extend to one of his favorite political straw men: the poor, with...

This story seems far-fetched, since it asks us to picture Reagan counting to twenty-four.

Calvin Trillin wrote, “If a cherry tree in the White House Rose Garden got chopped down and all the evidence pointed to Ronald Reagan, he would say, ‘I cannot tell a lie; there’s a lady in California who picks up her welfare check every week in a Cadillac.’ ”

(Never mind that the vast majority of welfare recipients were, and still are, white.)

Nancy could be heard lamenting that her husband couldn’t be with her to see “all these beautiful white people.”

In Reaganland, the homeless didn’t want homes, the unemployed didn’t want jobs, and, in possibly his nerviest claim, the hungry didn’t want food. “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night,” Reagan said in 1964. “Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

Later, when his image as governor was tarnished by a huge crowd of poor people jostling for free food at a distribution site, he suggested this novel solution to the hunger problem: “It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.”

Five years later, after being relentlessly mocked as an intellectual gerbil, he was finished in politics. If no one emerged from the Ridicule stage with a sunnier smile than Ronald Reagan, no one suffered its humiliations more spectacularly than Dan Quayle.

In other words, an egregious kiss-ass who’d shine a path forward for another toadying vice president from Indiana, Mike Pence.

The Bush brain trust convinced themselves that their boy wasn’t just handsome: he was a dead ringer for Robert Redford. This might have been true had there been a film in which Redford played a startled deer.

“I am amazed to have inspired Dan Quayle… [I]t seems he didn’t understand the movie.”

Still, it might have been Quayle’s resemblance not to Redford but to Bush himself that best explains his anointment. In a novel approach to ticket-balancing, a white male scion of a wealthy family in Connecticut chose a white male scion of a wealthy family in Indiana.

“Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

He created word mazes worthy of M. C. Escher from which his audiences had no easy escape: “And let me say in conclusion, thanks for the kids. I learned an awful lot about bathtub toys—about how to work the telephone. One guy knows—several of them know their own phone numbers—preparation to go to the dentist. A lot of things that I’d forgotten. So it’s been a good day.”

He could state the obvious and somehow make it shocking, as when he visited Auschwitz and observed, “Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren’t they?”

Quayle spewed nonsense worthy of Lewis Carroll on opium.

“You take the United Negro College Fund model that what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”

It’s] time for the human race to enter the solar system.”

“It’s wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago.”

“I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future”;

“I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made,” he declared.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Quayle, a fire-breathing congressional opponent of affirmative action, had taken advantage of a special admissions program designed to favor minority applicants. No one could figure out which minority group he belonged to, other than “blond newspaper heirs.”

Republicans “understand the importance of bondage between parent and child,”

Bush showed admirable restraint by not bragging about other things that Quayle didn’t do, such as assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand or exploding the Hindenburg.