Around the time Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for President of the United States, many of the clever and astute among us remarked that the 2006 film Idiocracy was in essence becoming reality. The movie’s theme is that of a dystopian future wherein people become hopelessly dependent on technology and the species regresses to the point that the President of the United States is a glorified professional wrestler. Like Trump.
Trump has actually appeared on stage in the WWE as it were, and has been reality show trash his entire life, even before he had a reality show, and even before we had reality TV. He’s always been a bogus personality. He just used to have to rely on the occasional shitty Barbara Walters segment to promote his trash image.
There may be some dysgenics involved.
Since birth control became widely distributed in the late sixties, the dumber among us have been reproducing at a much greater rate because they think Jesus hates condoms. That weird family down by the creek who make their own clothespins has fourteen kids. The friendly neighbor and his wife who work the cardiology wing and occasionally drop off banana bread are still trying. The second, third, fourth generation of Honey Boo Boo and Billy Ray Cyrus are upon us, and they love reality TV.
In Idiocracy, futuristic technology is depicted in a cartoonish, slapstick manner. A pizza ATM, an oculus sex chair. We have those now, but the real culprit is more incendiary, and wouldn’t read well on camera. Smart phones. People can’t look up. Can’t follow a film.
Check Twitter. A network where you speak in 1/3 sentences. Where nobody can properly articulate any point beyond I Hate, I Heart. This leads to confusion and hoards of idiots squabbling amongst one another.
Our standards really are dumbed down, there’s no other realistic point of view. Pop culture is fucked. It was weird in the 50’s, but at least then it attempted to be genuine. The artists portrayed themselves as earnest. The sixties were a necessary time of rebellion, the seventies and eighties were trying to figure it out. By the nineties we were ironing out some kinks but then the illuminati took hold. A few buildings went down, the economy tanked, and we came out with Justin Bieber. Censorship, a new scare. The Patriot Act. Divisiveness. Fucked up veterans. Back to the 50’s, just shittier music. Beyonce. Autotune performed on a laptop while she dances around like the most self-important stripper of all time. People worship Kanye West simply because he’s an asshole. Elvis would be ashamed to steal one of his songs. For multiple reasons.
Trump may be the obvious exhibit, but the fact that a politician as shamelessly corrupt as Hillary Clinton is being lionized as a progressive by her pseudo intellectual pseudo liberal casual feminist and hostile yet resigned fan base doesn’t bode well for humanity.
Remember when Donald Trump said that thing that was really obnoxious and Hillary Clinton or the person running her Twitter account wrote to him,”Delete your account”?
YOLO.
The next morning the following headlines popped up on the Huffington Post and similar sites which pretend to be earthy and independent but are in fact owned by media conglomerates targeting the entitled I Tip My Mexican Nanny Well demo to sell them the same shit as everyone else: “Hillary Clinton Just Broke the Internet” “Hillary Clinton Dropped a Weapon of Mass Disstruction” and “17 Flawless Reactions to #DeleteYourAccount” amongst others.
What is she the next Don Rickles? I hate to break up your incredibly lame, incredibly forced party, but that burn wasn’t that good ladies. It’s like a 3. If you couldn’t tell by its content, or the fact that Katy Perry has more followers than the President Obama, Twitter is drastically dumbing down anyone who checks it on their phone every ten minutes. That includes you, progressive meme posters.
Fuck ethical standards, what happened to comedic standards? (If we’re talking the diss game, Donald Trump is so much better than Hillary it’s just laughable so what you’re doing reads as desperate. You’re applauding the lady at the nursing home for stumbling through a knock knock joke.)
If Trump, a former reality show host with zero political experience, became the most powerful man in the world, (except for the CEOs who tell the president what to do or else they’ll off their children), it would indeed signify a fairly insurmountable plunge into idiocracy.
The fact is, we’re already there.
Because a currently serving US diplomat has a reality show about being a US diplomat.
His name is Rufus Gifford. He’s currently the US ambassador to Denmark, appointed by Barack Obama and confirmed by the US Senate, and he’s released a reality show on Danish television which is now available around the world on Netflix. He filmed this while serving his position and receiving paid a salary.
Spoiler alert: He’s openly gay. (Being a gay guy still passes for bawdy cutting edge entertainment among fat women in the deep south who like to get drunk on Four Loco and talk shit about their husbands while watching shitty reality TV which they often are too pilled up to realize they’re starring in.)
Gifford sets an interesting precedent. I don’t know how it works, but I watched the first episode of his show, which is called I am the Ambassador.
If it’s cool for a diplomat to film a reality show, why not the president? I mean, surely Hillary Clinton would want you following her around with a hot mic catching her dolling out insider trading tips and tax loopholes as shush money right?
In said first episode Gifford is shown discussing ISIS with the Danish ambassador to America about how the new Cold War should be handled between the Danish government and the American government.
So, clearly completely pointless babble. Yet, someone at the State Department would have had to approve a final cut of this show before it was aired to make sure it didn’t contain any sensitive intelligence information, right?
So that ISIS couldn’t scout out major terrorist attractions in Denmark such as, where is the gay porn factory we must scout it and blow some dudes to make sure they’re gay and then consider blowing it up, right?
So, someone at the State Department is essentially spending their time editing content for a reality show, right?
An American diplomat filming a reality show is really a monumental step. It’s something. Probably bad. Maybe good. It’s just never happened before. A reality TV guy being president, we can’t have that. But, diplomats, they’re fine. Not a slippery slope. Not at all.
Assuming we’re going with the educational angle, why don’t we skip this whole Denmark thing and start broadcasting the meetings between the US and Saudi Arabian ambassadors? That might be a compelling reality show that almost nobody would watch as they’d realize their own currency was being destroyed.
It’s called escapism. Fallon is playing cornhole with Blac Chyna’s face holes at 11:30.
Gifford doesn’t seem like a bad guy at all. Although he’s a reality show guy now, so all bets are out the window. The wheels were set in motion before he arrived. If it weren’t him, it’d be someone else. This is the end game. He says:
“We call it a documentary series, not a reality show, to distinguish ourselves as much as we can from the Real Housewives and the Kardashians.”
You say tomato, I say fuck you. To give you an idea of how relentlessly full of shit this guy is, the first episode is centered around his birthday. This is what he says while sitting in a limo going through various voicemails while he wistfully meditates on the significance of his birthday and tears up at one point either out of shear sociopathy or because he was hand selected by someone behind the scenes at G8 because he’s emotionally unstable and will make for okay material. That’s how they cast reality shows. Either way, this is what he says (INTERCUT):
“What would I like to be doing today? Would I like to go to the beach and take a walk absolutely but, you know, this job, I’m all in, and when I get invited to events, it’s hard for me to turning forty and being an ambassador, I’m crashing a barbecue that didn’t have anything to do with my birthday, but now it might be a birthday thing. This is my mom, she sent me a birthday message this morning, I’m sad that my family’s not coming to my birthday, it’s hard. I’m doing my birthday here, it’s hard, I’ll miss them, but you know this is my home now.”
To state the obvious, if this were to be a believable Documentary Series, please inform me what sober forty year old man cares about his fucking birthday???!!!!
The next episode features a shitty staged group conversation about how his birthday went down.
How shitty are Danish storyline producers?
Or, US diplomats.
Isn’t America consistently striving to promote an image of strength? Like, all that military propaganda they pay for at football games?
Whose idea was it to show our guy crying about his birthday, and can they please be fired immediately?
Not because of the foreign policy implications, which, if ISIS were a real and not created threat, this would definitely boost their morale after they binge watched Season 1, as they most certainly have from their compounds.
The national security you morons are always getting huffed up about is one thing, I say fire whoever’s in charge because this show sucks.
Prior to be appointed his cushy position, Gifford was a major fundraiser for Obama’s first win.
They owed him something.
Hillary too.
Idiocracy is fully upon us. Gifford just punctured the hull, and before we know it we’ll be sinking. The vice president will be checking his phone during the debates. The Secretary of Defense will be getting an STD test on an MTV segment. The head of the Supreme Court will be holding a little service dog. Congress will outlaw gluten and then vote to bomb Pakistan.
Regardless of who becomes president there’s no turning back now. This is where our species was fated to go.
Gifford took the first step. He’s bringing us into the next phase. Surrender. We lost.
He’s the new divinity. Bad Jesus. Xenu. Pray to him from your steakhouses or vegan bistros, and catch his show on Netflix.