Peak Stupid

So what if I told you that one of the following would be true, and you’d have to guess which one it was:

• A congressman under investigation for drug use and sex crimes would be the pick for U.S. attorney general.

• A 58-year-old Mike Tyson returned to the ring after smoking toad venom.

• InfoWars, a cesspool of far right conspiracy theories, is bought by the satirical newspaper The Onion.

• Mislabeled butter across the country had to be recalled because of fears the public wouldn’t know that butter contained milk.

• Ben and Jerry’s, an ice cream company whose flavors include Karamel Sutra and Schweddy Balls sues for the right to weigh in on American policy on the Gaza Strip.

And then what if I told you that it was in fact a trick question because ALL of these were true? Oh, and there’s more. All of these events happened within two days — not two years, not two months, not two weeks — of each other, but two days. If I hadn’t painted myself into this 48-hour corner, shoot, I might have included the Roman Coliseum, yes THAT Roman Coliseum, being rented out by Airbnb for actual fights in the image of the Hollywood production Gladiator II. Or the professional wrestling executive picked to be Secretary of Education. (Hulk Hogan must be dismayed he hasn’t been picked for Treasury — yet.)

But here’s what frosts me. In October I retired from being a full-time humor columnist. What was I thinking? If I had known all this merriness was on the way, I might have held out. This is like a cosmologist retiring two months before the Big Bang.

On the other hand, maybe from here there’s no place to go but down (or up, depending on your point of view). Maybe the world has reached Peak Stupid. Maybe, like any other natural resource such as oil, there is a finite supply of stupidity, where production ultimately reaches its maximum potential, after which it will begin to decline irreversibly.

Yet Peak Oil was supposed to occur in 1965. Then 1980. Then 2000. What happened instead was that drilling technology kept getting better, leading to exponentially increased production. In a similar vein, we now have more avenues in which to let out stupidity shine through. Viewed this way, social media is not all that different from fracking.

Every day when you skim the headlines it feels as if some great natural selection event must be coming, something that will make Covid look like a cat allergy. We will undo every lesson we have learned about public health to the point where there will be a Facebook group calling itself the League to Bring Back Smallpox. Because everyone has the right to have smallpox if they so choose, isn’t that how modern thinking goes?

But rather than being horrified I’m oddly fascinated to see how Peak Stupid plays out. Whether it’s politics, sports, media or industry, does leadership really matter?

By the end of his second term, Reagan thought Mikhail Gorbachev had been succeeded by Boris Karloff. Nixon was drinking heavily and talking out loud to the portraits on the walls. Wilson was in a coma. When news broke that Calvin Cooligedge had died, Dorothy Parker said, “How could they tell?”

And that was just the 20th century. In the 19th Americans were actively electing muskrat trappers to represent them in Congress.

What if the concept of leadership has all been a lie? Instead of Madison, Hamilton and Jay, what if the Federalist Papers had been written by Larry, Moe and Curly — throwing talc in each others’ faces while calling for a separation of powders, nyuk nyuk nyuk.

A Three Stooges movie about a  trio of idiots running great American companies into the ground would have been entirely plausible to mid-20th century America decades before anyone had heard the words “private equity.”

I’m not complaining, capitalism and liberal democracy have served us well for 250 years. Just like coal. But after last week, it seems there has to be a better way.