It's morning in the Fifth Dumbest City in America.
It could've been worse - Merced and Visalia, just up the road, came in first and fourth, respectively. Modesto fared a little better, at tenth. That means of the ten stupidest cities in America, four are located here in the San Joaquin Valley. We beat out even Texas as the stupidest region of the country.
Quite the achievement, I must say.
When I saw the news report last night, I felt compelled to blog about it (see below) and it ends up I missed the best part... the local reaction. They sent a reporter "out in the field" (to Starbucks) to see what the yokels thought about it. The reporter thrust a microphone at a Cro-Magnon-ish woman and asked for her opinion of the survey.
"It's not right. My daughter learns good here."
Of all the people to interview, they chose Koko the Talking Gorilla.
Case closed.
It reminded me of something I was going to write about a couple of weeks ago. I was channel surfing one day and came across the movie "Idiocracy". As described by Wikipedia...
The film tells the story of two ordinary people who are taken into a top-secret military hibernation experiment that goes awry, and awaken 500 years in the future. They discover that the world has degenerated into a dystopia where advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly stupid human society devoid of individual responsibility or consequences.
I never saw the film before and only caught the last half hour or so, but my first thought was "whoever wrote this must be from Bakersfield". It was just a little too spot on.
I do remember there was a bit of controversy when it came out. I was still working in Hollywood at the time and there were accusations that the studio that released it, Twentieth Century Fox, essentially abandoned it. Dumped it into the market with little or no advertising and then pulled it from theaters after only a short time. Fox is owned by News Corp, which also owns Fox "News". The word on the street was that Rupert Murdock (who owns News Corp) or his minions, realized that the film was mocking their core "News" audience. It was a swift kick in the nuts to the Glenn Beck and O'Reilly crowd. Since Fox makes far more money off their propaganda operation than they could ever hope to earn from the film, they torpedoed it.
That sounds about right to me.
The film was released in 2006, in the "Pre-Palin" era. At the time people found it's premise outlandish.
Four years later, it feels oddly prescient.
