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Stupid is where it's at

"Stupid, for lack of a better word, is good." What? I got the quote wrong? Greed? That line is supposed to be about greed? From Wall Street ? Whatever, dude. That was so... so 1980s. Everyone knows greed is good. Like, duh.
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"Stupid, for lack of a better word, is good."

What? I got the quote wrong? Greed? That line is supposed to be about greed? From Wall Street ? Whatever, dude. That was so... so 1980s.

Everyone knows greed is good. Like, duh. If greed wasn't good we wouldn't have trickle-down economics. We wouldn't have the conservative revolution, St. Reagan, a bailed-out-but-still-rich world banking class, massive deficits and the über-secret government(sic) of Little Stevie Hapless, whose mismanagement of the country's purse makes the dough Jean Chrétien's Liberals squandered on the sponsorship scandal look like chump change.

Stupid is where it's at now. If you want to do well in politics these days, you can't be too stupid, too narrowly self-interested, or too vitriolic. And god help you if you actually know what vitriolic means because if you do, you're probably too intellectual, too effete, too - horrors - elite, to appeal to a populace enthralled in their quest to discover who can dance better than a 5 th grader but too indifferent to pay any real attention to the adult problems surrounding them.

I stumbled across a movie a few years ago called Idiocracy . It was low-brow and, well, stupid and I almost turned it off in favour of doing something more intellectually stimulating, like clipping my toenails. But something about it drew me in.

Briefly, the film's setup was that at the dawn of the 21 st century, self-centred, career-oriented, intelligent couples delayed reproducing while they pursued life in the rewarding lane, leaving the dolts to throw chil'en like bunnies in heat. The obvious, long-term results were a dumbing down of the population over time. How dumb? Dumb enough that the film's protagonist, a goldbricking Army slacker "volunteered" for a suspended animation experiment woke up 500 years later to discover he was the smartest man in a world consisting largely of fast food, daytime TV and people so stupid they make Jerry Springer's guests look like a panel of imminent scientists and philosophers.

The film haunts me to this day. I'm not entirely sure its sledgehammer-to-the-frontal-lobe examination of stupid culture wasn't meant as a documentary. The more glimpses of popular culture I get - and most definitely the more I try to follow politics - the more I'm convinced it was less a foreshadowing of the future and more an examination of what's happening around us right now.

For all the oh-how-quaint-was-that knocks levelled at the 1950s - the cliché of which was remembered again this week when Leave It To Beaver's mom died - one of the oft-forgotten traits of that time was a grass-roots intellectual striving. People whose lives were handicapped by growing up during the Great Depression and interrupted by World War II, often sidelined in their academic pursuits, wanted to understand the world around them. They read popular books; they read classics, or at least the abridged versions thereof; they followed world news; they drove their children to be better educated than they were. Smart was cool.

Smart ain't cool anymore. As an expat American, I can only shudder at what's happening on the other side of the border as mid-term elections approach in a couple of weeks. Card-carrying and stubbornly proud idiots are about to take control of congress and finish the job they started under St. Reagan and tried mightily to complete under Bush the Stupid - driving the country and, if they have their way the world, back into the Dark Ages.

Stupid attacks the other, whether the other is eastern-educated elites, religious minorities, racial minorities, homosexuals, fact-based science or, gasp, even Canadians. Canadians!?

Yet again this week, Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle - who stands an inexplicably good chance of unseating majority leader Harry Reid in Nevada's senate race - claimed Canada's "porous" border allowed terrorists, and by direct implication 9/11 terrorists, into the US. That most of them were in the country on student visas was just an annoying fact. "Fact? We don't need no stinkin' facts."

Ironically, it was one of her smarter statements and not, by a long shot, the dumbest thing uttered on the US campaign trail this week. And while it may, for a moment, make those of us on this side of the border feel a bit smug, au contraire, mon cher. We have our own idiots and dolts whipping up frenzy and hysteria and appealing to the lesser angels and downright mean-spiritedness of the electorate.

Rob "dumber than a bag of hammers" Ford is running a fear and ignorance campaign to become the next mayor of Toronto (Motto: centre of Canada... aren't we?). He's running ahead of his opponents by a margin eroding daily as Torontonians - generally somnambulant about mayoral elections - awaken to the possibility of being led by a hot-headed simpleton and decide cooler, smarter, heads should prevail.

Now frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn who the mayor of Toronto is. But I do care about who the mayor of Tiny Town is and loathe though I am to take issue with a fellow writer, especially one from the same newsmagazine, the answer to your editorial question last week, Jesse, is no, Whistler could definitely not use a Rob Ford. At least not in the mayor's chair.

Over the past two years of this council, over the terms of the ones before that, over the last 14 years I've been venting on this page, I've never been shy about taking our civic leaders to task for their decisions, their process and their horribly, horribly bungled communications crimes. Sometimes I've even praised them and, no, it's not something I'm proud of.

But with one notable exception, I've never impugned their motives. Simply, that's because I've never found evidence of backroom deals, hidden agendas or blinding self-interest guiding the decisions they've made. I've disagreed with lots of those decisions, written about quite a few, but generally from the perspective that reasonable people can disagree.

And that, unfortunately, is not where the disagreement over the asphalt plant wound up. The loudest, most vitriolic voices in that fight wouldn't see the issues as ones reasonable minds might disagree on. They suggested ugly, ulterior motives drove the mayor and two councillors who ultimately voted in favour of the motion to move the plant and change the zoning. They were the face of the kind of politics Rob Ford is hoping will land him in the mayor's seat in Toronto.

Ironically, had Jesse's own Fordian character not pressed for the precipitous motion to have the plant moved by June 1 st of this year, this whole drama might have played out far differently.

So, no, Jesse, no. We don't need a Rob Ford. We don't need a mayor who likens "harm reduction to giving alcohol to alcoholics... (and) slams his laptop in a hissy fit when council delayed a decision on a daycare."

For so many reasons, and in so many ways, we deserve better.