WSJ: "You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity"

Dear readers, please don't fail to read "You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity", by Lance Morrow, in the Wall Street Journal, 29/8/21... even if you have to subscribe! (The WSJ is one of the few American news outlets that provides reasonably fair and balanced coverage of American politics.) 

This is the subhead: The convergence of many seemingly unrelated elements has produced an explosion of brainlessness. And here's the beginning.

"Stupidity," Jean Cocteau remarked, "is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become." 

We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time -- one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analyzed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins.

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. 

"Trump is crazy!"

"Trump is Hitler!"

"Trump is a Russian agent!"

"Bob Mueller has the goods!"

Both times, the Road Runner sped away. Beep beep!

Of course there's more. The message I take from it is this.

Yes, President Trump told you so! Walt told you so! 1000s of other people, amazed and distressed by the prevailing stupidity, told you so! It's time to put an end to the stupidity. Mid-terms are coming up in just 15 months. You know what to do... don't you?!

Chuck Jones' Rules for the Roadrunner and Coyote

Those who [like me! Ed.] have known Walt for donkeys' know of my undying love for Warner Brothers cartoons, but only the good ones which were produced for showing in cinemas. The later ones, from about 1960 onwards, produced for TV with the execrable Hanna-Barbera-style "limited animation", bite the big one. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the later Roadrunner cartoons, where the motion of the characters' legs and feet is just a circular blur. The BWBDOAT (Best Warner Bros. Director of All Time), Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones would never have allowed such cheap visual tricks. He had very strict rules -- he actually called them "rules", not just a style guide -- for the depiction of the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, and the latter's fanatical pursuit of the former.

Here, courtesty of Agent 6, are Mr Jones' original rules for the Roadrunner & Coyote.

Th-th-th-th-th-th-that's all folks!