Showbits

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

The greatest threat the world faces is not global warming or terrorism; it's ignorance. Yet it's the stupid people who are reproducing; birth control prevents conception only among those smart enough to use it. With no natural predators, humanity is evolving to favor not positive traits, but common ones. If "Go forth and multiply" is a warfare tactic, then in Idiocracy, it's a winning one.

In this film, recommended to me by a Showbits member, Luke Wilson plays an average G.I. Joe who, in a nod to the book Looking Backward, is put into a deep sleep meant to be shorter than its actual 500 years. When he wakes up, America is an idiocracy — a government run by idiots, as that's all that evolution has left. Though Joe is first mocked, derided, and even feared by the populace (much as any high school nerd would be), they eventually realize his fair-to-middlin' I.Q. makes him the smartest man alive. Wrestler-turned-president Camacho asks for his help to fix the world's troubles — but Joe's challenge isn't solving the basic quandaries America has found itself in, but convincing the population that his unfathomable answers will work where corporate-motivated solutions have not.

This film succeeds more as a political commentary than the comedy it tries to be. It doesn't take the audience long to recognize the exaggerated redneck — sorry, Appalachian American — behavior, and these jokes play themselves out fairly quickly. After the first half-hour, it's unlikely anything original, creative, or surprising will happen, given how stupid and predictable everyone but Joe is.

In our superiority, we're more likely to empathize with him and his obvious grasp of the situation. But how many of us will identify with the idiots and their blatant inability to grasp the inconvenient truth: that their practices, behaviors, and "solutions" are, in fact, causing the very problems they are trying to solve.

All that is necessary for evil to win is for good men to do nothing. Whether the problem is white trash or environmental change, we may not have the generous five centuries Joe did before our dilemma becomes obvious and irreversible.