A Statement Of Disunion, the State Of Our Disillusion

The Problem with America is that there are far too many stupid Americans.

But even Voltaire, the Parisian OG of mocking stupid Americans all the way back to 1759, could not resolve the ultimate paradox of our fledgling country, and so, the morning after both the longest and least-consequential State of The Union address in history, we must ask ourselves once again: are Stupid Americans (STAM’s) more stupid now than they used to be?

My feeling is no, they’re exactly the same. We neither evolve nor devolve so quickly. But if the sea (social media) were made of whiskey (drunken currents of approval/aggrievement), we’d all be Jacques Cousteau.

The problem is that STAMS are both impervious to hangovers (due to their concrete neural pathways) and the terrifying degree to which social media allows them to herd together, like bison on the Great Plains of Negative Erudition, to re-affirm their collective ignorance.

Which means, in essence, that Stupid Americans are exactly the suspect protoplasm they have always been, all the way back to the Cambrian Explosion of 900 million B.C., when we were all still multicellular sponges. It’s just that now the sponges are dangerous.

Various inane and evidence-free tropes, biases, and confabulations (notions of a Flat Earth, insistence on Geocentrism, tales of The Resurrection, and/or Trickle-Down Economics), used to be randomized and isolated in small groups, revivals, militias, and rural evangelical pockets.

Now, through the miracle of Google, the same fact-averse cliques and incurious factions are unified.

At least in their inability to define Google, or spell UNIFIED.

But they are a more easily manipulated voting bloc.

You can run the numbers on the intellectual quotient and relative educational levels of MAGA all you like, and just in terms of sheer, inarguable math it’s not heartening, but I think what we miss as a society in dismissing MAGA as an inevitable extension of STAM, is that beyond a staggering degree of credulity, MAGA is really a collective expression of exhaustion.

It’s hard, sweaty labor to be angry all the time. A specific grievance can keep a man alive on death row for decades, but aggrievement as a general matter, always on the simmer, stripped away from ideas, policy, solutions, initiatives, and political concession, feels good. At least for a minute. But much like a popsicle-denied child taking a dump on the kitchen floor, when the Tea Party runs out of manufactured Kenyan Birtherism fuel, all that’s left is emptiness and bitter fumes.

Just like how it seemed okay to do cocaine four nights a week during the 1980s because all your friends and co-workers were doing cocaine four nights a week during the 1980s, it often doesn’t matter how absurd or illogical what you believe is, all that matters is the number of people who believe it right along with you. There is safety in even illusory numbers, but there is genuine relief in Total Acceptance.

Every civilization in human history that attempted a form of representative government with individual rights eventually became exhausted by the mental strain of having to handle the complexity and nuance that such non-animal behavior required, and so eventually turned to autocracy.

Autocracy is valium. Problems are branded phraseology. Solutions are improbably simple. One man can fix everything. One side is to blame for everything unfixed. If only that senator were less annoying. If we do it, it’s necessary. If they do it, it’s betrayal.

It is a weakness of mind, the craving for something solid to grab onto in a thoroughly unsolid world.

Noam Chomsky, everyone’s favorite totally mystifying Epstein Pal (Steve Hawking a close second) wrote Manufacturing Consent in 1988, which, as it turns out, was right when Jeff and Ghislaine and Donald J. Pedophile were launching their new business, but in any case was a brutal takedown of the unholy nexus of Democracy and Media. Essentially, Chomsky (between underwear-on massages), postulated that 80% of the electorate was irrelevant, since they were STAMS incapable of processing complicated political or philosophical nuances.

Therefore, every American election was an attempt to sway the remaining elite 20%, (professors, white collar types, political junkies, professionals, the highly educated, the wealthy) through dirty tricks, personality considerations, and oppressive waves of television advertisement, to split 11-9 for one candidate or another.

Well, at least that’s how I remember Consent while reading it in the early 90s, but I always thought Noam was onto something, at least prior to the Internet. Now I think it is the 20% that are irrelevant, mainly because the billionaire 1% can now purchase the allegiance of just enough STAMS through the social media companies that made them billionaires to begin with, to negate the other 19% with AI bullshit.

In other words, there is no reason to have intelligible policy, reasonable political goals, governmental representation, or hard-won consensus, except to the degree that your Language Learning Model requires it to sway STAMS on TikTok.

(It occurs to me to wonder, for the first time since typing this sentence, that perhaps Noam’s buddy Jeffrey suggested the title Manufacturing Consent as a sly inside joke while working the runway/dressing rooms of Donald’s Miss Teen USA contest?)

It turns out, in a connected world, that it is not enough to provide concrete evidence when facing manufactured identity. Political Identity, as opposed to political opinion, on both the Left and Right, is impervious to rationale.

For instance, casually mentioning to your MAGA wife that 30 weeks ago Donald J. Trump said, after dropping bombs on Iran, that the Iranian nuclear program was obliterated and would take ten years to recover, and then as you sat together holding hands on the couch watching The State Of The Nation last night while Donald J. Trump, with zero shame or even explanation, said that Iran is a week away from a nuclear bomb in order to justify military intervention, even though he ran on an America-First platform that insisted there would be no new wars, and he already solved nine of them but not this one, earning him the much-coveted FIFA Peace Prize – she will still find a way to dispute it.

Even the part about condemning Iran for killing protestors, but not condemning ICE for killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Because, what you’re asking of a STAM in 2026, under the second endless occupation of this president/human locust, is not to “arrive at a conclusion after the consideration of certain facts”, you’re demanding, with every chink of fallacy that flies away from the chisel, “Hey, can you stop being you?”

Almost no one wants to stop being them.

A bullet-proof identity is more seductive than meth, and facts are the remaining teeth that stand between meth and comforting illogic.

“Being There” is a 1970 Jerzy Kosinski novel about an imbecile who speaks in such generalities that people assume his dimwitticisms are profound. In other words, “Being There” should be renamed “the Deepak Chopra Story,“ and Kosinski should be renamed Nostradamus.

“Forrest Gump” is a deeply stupid 1994 movie about a deeply stupid man whose behavior sways deeply stupid people to do deeply stupid things, delivered with the sort of cutting-edge Robert Zemeckis technology that beguiled half a generation of cinema goers, like zombies staring at fireworks, into believing that there was value in innocent stupidity. We are still paying the insanely steep price for Forrest Gump.

Also, Hanks will be dropped for the coming sequel, "Gump II: Dipshit Boogaloo", so that Forrest can be played by Kid Rock, a born method actor if there ever was one.

You know who is not a MAGA hero? My man Socrates. Which is strange, because Socrates hated democracy while living in the purest form of Athenian democracy that ever existed. In fact, Socrates committed suicide by drinking hemlock, when Athenian Democracy itself began to go the way of Project 2025. He did not hate the form of governance because of the freedom it offered the people, including himself, he feared it because he saw how leaving all decisions to “the people” would eventually mean the dumbest among us would lead the dumbest among them, as soon as they truly recognized one another.

Donald J. Trump and STAMS have been Tinder-Smashing and staring deep into one another’s blank, occluded eyes since 2015.

Here's a short list of the things that Donald J. Trump and Jesus have in common: 1. They spent a lot of time hanging with prostitutes, 2. Their best friends were lepers, and 3. They have multiple bestsellers that were ghostwritten.

America, as a union, occupies exactly the state that it is currently in because Stupid Americans, who are now close to a majority of Americans, refused, for a decade, to make this president pay any price at all for his endless, blatant stupidity. 

By excusing the worst of him in return for a few policy favors we all got to find out that we hadnt even begun to see the worst of him.

The banality of evil, as it turns out, is not a buffet. You are either ladling from no chafing dishes or you have your snout in all the chafing dishes at once. Stupidity may or may not be preordained, depending on your stance in the world of neuroscience, but convenience very definitely is. And America, for all its high-flown ideology and philosophy and noble origin-stories, is really built on pure convenience in the face of moral contradiction, and the feral unwillingness to relinquish a single inch the identity required to live with it.