Triumph of the Dumbasses

When I was nine, my parents got divorced. My parents shared custody, but in those days that meant that I lived with my mom and saw my dad on alternate weekends and holidays. At the time, we lived in a suburb of Baltimore, a sort of progressive-leaning enclave that lacked true diversity, but also made all of the (era-appropriate) noises about enlightenment, tolerance, etc.

After the divorce, Mom and my new stepfather moved us about half an hour north and west, to a rural town out in the sticks. Understand that this was 1980, so rural meant no cable TV, obviously no internet. It was a more isolated place and while we didn’t use the term then, now we would (and do) call it a red town. The opposite of the place I’d lived up until then. Occasionally, the KKK would hold rallies in a field next door to the house of a guy who became a good friend of mine. (To be clear: He wasn’t a fan of the KKK. They used the field next to his house and his mom couldn’t stop them.)

My first experience in this new town was when my mom took my test scores to my new school so that I could be placed for fifth grade in the fall. According to her, the principal looked at my paperwork, told her “No one scores like this,” and decided that I would be in the “average” class as opposed to the advanced class, where I’d always been at my previous school.¹

Everyone in that class hated me.

Even the teacher mocked me, calling me “the human encyclopedia” or “the walking dictionary.” Just because I was a smart kid.²

This was my first experience with the streak of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. The first time I saw hatred directed at me just because of my brain. It was stark and shocking and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have a lasting impact on me. A whole year as the new kid, in a new school, mercilessly mocked and bullied for…being smart? Really? That was a thing?

At the time, without pervasive, intrusive mass media, the difference in moving a mere half-hour away was tremendous. I went from a Democratic-leaning, reality-based community to a right-leaning one. A place where parents insisted their kids not use the fluoride offered by the school (what?) and signed their kids out of health class because they didn’t want them to learn about their bodies (double what?).

And that’s before you add in religion.

I’d been raised in a mixed household. My Jewish mother was not religious at all. “A long time ago, a bunch of people wandered in the desert and made up stories to get through it,” I remember her telling me.

My dad took me to church semi-regularly, but didn’t seem to take it too seriously. He, too, leaned into the “these are stories” philosophy, and going to church seemed more about tradition and keeping my grandparents off his back than anything else.

So, I knew religion, but I didn’t take it seriously, and no one around me did, either.

Until I moved.

These new people around me took their religion very seriously. I discovered this on the playground one recess when I very innocently and casually mentioned that my mother was Jewish, and my new friend Richard informed me very gravely that “Your mom killed Christ.”

To this point, I had not experienced any sort of antisemitism, much less this very specific line of religious bullshit. I told Richard he was wrong (because, well, he was) and he insisted and even though I didn’t know where the hell this was coming from, I knew at the age of ten that if someone dissed³ your mom, you had to fight.

So Richard and I fought the way ten-year-olds fought and the whole thing is just galactically stupid.

Which is the theme of this piece. Stupidity. Ignorance. Dumbasses.

Dumbasses who are happy to let their kids’ teeth rot because they’re afraid of fluoride, who are happy to let their kids get sick or pregnant or both because they’re afraid of knowledge, who are happy to spread religious bullshit because it’s all they know.

Like the farmers in my new community who, years later, as the local paper reported, were suffering from a drought and complained to their Congressional representative that the government was preventing rain. And the rep didn’t laugh at this or explain reality to them, but rather listened seriously and promised to look into it back in Washington.

That rep (who took office when I was in college) was a man named Roscoe Bartlett. By all accounts, an intelligent man, with a doctorate in physiology. I’m sure he knew that the complaints of government weather control were crap, but he decided to go along to get along and thereby gave credence to their idiocy. He bolstered their nonsense suppositions and conspiracy theories.

Giving the dumbasses a fig leaf, which is all they ever need to spread their garbage.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s the world we live in now, except half the fucking country thinks the government controls the weather and half the fucking people in charge are willing to go along with them.

Wondering how we got here? Well, it doesn’t help that most Americans can’t read beyond a sixth grade level. My daughter is in fourth grade and she reads at higher than a sixth grade level. My ten-year-old is better able to process and interpret information than millions of adults who get to vote.

But even if these people could read and comprehend what they read, the problem is that they wouldn’t. Because almost half of all Americans don’t read any books at all.  And even those who do, at best, read one book every two months.

So, yeah. Basically, you have a culture of people who have limited knowledge, don’t care that they have limited knowledge, and lack the capacity to rectify the situation.

Here’s a great example of what we’re up against, one that hits home for me. Back in November of 2023, a very stupid woman in Dover, New Hampshire filed a complaint to have my book Boy Toy removed from high school libraries. You’ll see why I call her very stupid in a moment.

This woman — her name is Julie Porter⁴ — filed her complaint and when the school district said, “Nah, it’s a good book; we’re gonna keep it,” she appealed. She lost the appeal, too. Yay.

But her complaint is a public document, so I looked at it. And of course it’s the usual farrago of blatant misreadings, confusion, and bad faith arguments, but this one element jumped out at me:

I was thrown by this. Because Boy Toy doesn’t have a subtitle, and even if it did, it certainly wouldn’t be identical to the title of my first novel!

So, let’s look at the cover, shall we?

Let’s zoom in and see exactly what…

Oh, for the love of… It’s not a subtitle! It’s goddamn marketing copy! It’s plain as day: “By the author of.” What in the name of Zeus’s electrical testicles is wrong with this person? This epically, grotesquely, profoundly sub-moronic jackass?

Honest to God, these are the people we’re dealing with, people who are so blindingly fucking stupid that they can’t properly interpret a book cover, but have declared themselves competent to judge books. For everyone.

I don’t mind people being idiots, but do it on your time and don’t let it collide with my life.

But we don’t get to have nice things. And I don’t know how the hell you talk to people so abjectly, aggressively dumb.

“I love the poorly educated.” Well, of course he does. Because the dumbasses will do whatever you tell them, without questioning it. He loves the dumbasses because he’s one, too. He literally said on live television, “I have concepts of a plan.” I mean, come on!

He loves the dumbasses and they love him. Because they hate anyone smarter than them, which is pretty much anyone with a lick of sense. And because our country has done precisely zilch to combat the rising tide of anti-intellectualism, a tide rising long before I moved to the hinterlands, we find ourselves here. Now.

Today at noon, as I press “Publish” on this post, we bear witness to the (final?) Tr(i)ump(h) of the Dumbasses.

Good luck with that.

1. I can’t say why Mom didn’t raise a ruckus over this. It’s been decades and she doesn’t really remember. She was also juggling a lot at the time. So I’m sure she protested and he shot her down and she surrendered because was she going to go to war with the school?
2. Gee, I hope that doesn’t sound egotistical. I’m not saying I’m smarter than you. Just that I was smarter than that class. And that goddamn useless teacher.
3. A word we’d not have used at that place and time, but it’s perfect
4. Don’t @ me, bro — it’s a matter of public record. I’m not doxxing her.