An Xmas gift from a family member was Andy Borowitz’s 2022 book, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. Easy to see why they thought I’d like it, as a political junkie and intellectual snob.
Not a nasty snob of course; I’m a very nice person. On a lifelong quest to understand the world — which I do believe I’ve achieved to no small extent.
Borowitz, a comedian and satirist, also thinks himself smart. A better writer than me (see? I am humble. Though I do think I did something droll, writing-wise, right there); but entertaining as Borowitz is, the shtick soon became wearying.
After the introduction (with much reference to guess-who) and some knocks at earlier presidents which seemed facile cheap shots, Borowitz gets down to business on Reagan. Really a fat target.
Now, I was a Reagan supporter, and don’t repent. I still reckon him a good, maybe great, leader for his time. Getting the big things right. It’s true, he got a lot wrong, in the facts department, as Borowitz excruciatingly documents. But here’s the thing: Reagan’s misstatements were largely innocent. Not malevolent intentional lies. Reagan was a good person. Someone who, for all the howlers, we could look up to as a fitting leader of a great nation.
The book’s next victim is Dan Quayle. You can actually see Borowitz salivating, the page wet, as he relates the Lloyd Bentsen “You’re no Jack Kennedy” debate zinger.* Though suavely as that put-down was delivered, it actually rankles me as obnoxious arrogant bullying.
Then came the “potato” fiasco. Quayle was leading a grade school spelling bee; when a student correctly spelled the word, Quayle said it needed an “e” at the end. I never realized, until Borowitz’s footnote explained, that Quayle was working from index cards he’d been given; and the word was misspelled on the card. I said to myself: I could have made that mistake.
Nevertheless, it was the coup de grace for Quayle’s political mojo. Borowitz comments that this episode “illustrates the astonishing reality that, as recently as 1992, misspelling a word could damage a politician’s career.” Let alone a lie. We had standards then.
The book is structured like the supposed stages of grief. I’ve just recapped the first: ridicule. Reagan and Quayle were indeed widely ridiculed for their bloopers. George W. Bush headlines the second stage: acceptance. (For the record, I supported him too.) We’ve now gone on to stage three: celebration.
GWB’s case did normalize leaderly ignorance. Unlike Quayle who tried to hide it, Bush made it a selling point, realizing that many voters preferred a candidate more like themselves. Maybe not so dumb after all.
However, that wasn’t always what voters wanted. Time was, they did prefer someone they could look up to as their better. Imagining that that would be better for the country. What a quaint idea. Now there’s the “have a beer with” test. And of course there’s always been a strong strain of anti-intellectualism in America.
Borowitz says “there’s still some debate about whether Trump is dumb or smart. On one side are people with first hand knowledge of Trump. On the other is Trump.” Quoting him saying he’s “very, very, very smart,” and so forth. Then citing a vast corpus of contra-indications.
I’m actually baffled how a man could lead such a prominent life and end up such an ignoramus. Did no specks of knowledge penetrate? Fending them off must have taken immense force of will.
Yet there’s a difference between knowledge and intelligence. I actually think Trump is very intelligent. Though I’m not sure that’s quite the right word, implying an ability to manipulate information and ideas in one’s mind. For him it seems to work more like Artificial Intelligence. Indeed, like ChatGPT, his ability to glibly spin words is prodigious — especially given a limited vocabulary.
Anyhow, his problem is not brain power, it’s brain disease. The man is literally batshit crazy. (That’s a clinical term.)
An example: Borowitz cites a radio appearance where Trump was challenged to multiply seventeen times six (seriously). I wouldn’t mock anyone unable to do that in their head. But Trump “confidently answered ‘Eleven-twelve.'” It’s not that he was wrong by an order of magnitude. Tossing out that answer as he did, somehow imagining it a good way to respond, bespeaks a very broken psyche. And this episode is Trump to a “T.”
That combination of what’s actually a cunning intelligence with profound ignorance and a deeply sick mind is not well suited to leadership of a great democratic nation.
But is that what we are? The real “profiles in ignorance” are not the politicians Borowitz skewers but voters who support them. A global problem. Turkey’s a recent demoralizing instance. Voting for Erdogan was just inexcusable.
There are plenty of explanations. But let’s apply a kind of Ockham’s razor. All too often the bottom line explanation is that voters’ choices are impelled by the most primitive lizard parts of their brains. Simply picking the most alpha male. But perhaps we can hope there’s a limit to how much of that voters can swallow before gagging.
And maybe Trump fatigue is finally setting in. At the January coin show, when I’d whip out my “Trump Shitstorm” book, eyes would often light up. At the August show, they’d often roll. (Though of course those were not Trumpsters.)
* Quayle, running for VP at 41, noted having had as much congressional experience as JFK when running for president. Bentsen, Quayle’s opponent, invoked his own personal knowledge of Kennedy.
