Is America's Love Affair with Stupidity Finally Over?

By Liz Langley, AlterNet. Posted January 14, 2009.

The "Real World" debuted in 1992, so we had reality TV, but it didn't multiply in a Tribble-esque frenzy. The sophisticated "Seinfeld," came onto the scene, people wore faux glasses and even drank "smart drinks," which contained amino acids to help memory, energy and cognition -- drank 'em in bars! We had a blonde pop star that liked to show her underwear, too -- but when Madonna did such things, it wasn't an accident, it was savvy marketing. It may not have been Paris in the '20s (we'll discuss it's less-bright side later) but it was probably the last time smart was cool.

Both 1988 and 2008 presented us with Republican vice-presidential candidates who were not the brightest pennies in the fountain -- and how differently we reacted to them shows how far we've come.

Dan Quayle routinely gave comedy writers the afternoon off by saying things like, "I have made good judgments in the past; I have made good judgments in the future," and "One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is 'to be prepared.' " We made fun of him. Mercilessly. But we accepted him.

Sarah Palin didn't fare as well. Compare Quayle's dippy quote to this circuitous mouthful she offered when she was asked to elaborate on her thoughts that the VP's job is a flexible one: "That thankfully our founders were wise enough to say we have this position and it's constitutional -- vice president will be able to be not only the position flexible, but it's gonna be those other duties as assigned by the president. A simple thing."

Yeah, me neither.

Bob Cesca of the Huffington Post made it his Most Ridiculous Political Quote of 2008, saying, "That she wasn't summarily laughed off of the national stage right then and there is a testament to the forgiveness of horny, middle-aged, white Republican men."

Landon Jones, author of William Clark and the Shaping of the West and former editor of People magazine, describes Sarah Palin as, "The mythological woman of the Golden West." It's a charmingly literary idea and goes quite a way to explain why she gained some bit of popularity.

"Everyone was sort of enchanted with her when she first emerged because she embodied these two contradictory views that America has always held about women in the West. One of them is that she's a saint -- the woman who gets off the stagecoach with the Bible in her hand and is going to bring God to this godless area. The other is Miss Kitty, the saloonkeeper in 'Gunsmoke.' "

She's no saint, but she's someone you can talk to, Jones says ... she's fallen, but OK.

"But then, the more she stuck around people began to see the flaws," he says. With the phrase "a heartbeat away from the presidency" looming constantly, and McCain looking older standing next to her, Palin's evident deficiencies began to seem to the American people, not funny but scary.

"I think that the threat of an intelligent woman may have once represented is gone," Jones says, citing how well Hillary Rodham Clinton did in the primaries. "You see that with Palin ... with the winking and slightly salacious smile ... the Palin act might have flown 10 years ago," but not anymore. And with such tough economic times, he says, "no one is in the mind for a comic."

Funny, though ... we put up with the unintentional comedy of Quayle, and later W. But when it came from a woman it didn't fly. It's easy to wonder if, on top of the bad economy and the exhaustion of a bad war, it may have finally scared us straight. Whoever is in charge, we can no longer drug ourselves with shopping.

Quayle's boss, George H.W. Bush, won the presidency after casting Michael Dukakis as an egghead elitist whose foreign policy ideas came from the "Harvard Yard boutique."

"No one, ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people," journalist H.L. Mencken once said, and while some were buying fake glasses and smart drinks, others were buying the idea that intellectualism was not to be trusted.

And then came Bill Clinton.

"The one thing (Clinton) didn't use was his brains,"says Martha Frankel,journalist, radio talk show host and author of Hats and Eyeglasses. "The man was a Rhodes scholar, and he should have pushed that, and he didn't. It's almost like they were embarrassed about that because people would say it was elitist."

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Liz Langley is a freelance writer in Orlando, Fla.

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