June 7, 2002

 mfinley.com   
"Stupid in America"

by Michael Finley

(c) 2002 by Michael Finley

My mother, who came to live with us in January, loves The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and every night at 10:30 she sits down with three graham crackers and 18 units of insulin and listens to the monologue and skits before taking the escalator to bed. I have been watching along with her, to keep her company.

Chances are you, too, have seen "Jaywalking," the feature where Leno goes out onto the street, in Burbank or on a college campus, and asks passersby elementary questions about history, government, and geography.

Invariably, people give answers indicating substantial ignorance about how the world works, who did, what, and why things are the way they are.

The Civil War was fought in the 17th century. Rudy Giuliani invented the radio. The Mayflower Compact had something to do with a moving van.

In this video village, everyone's the village idiot.

The segment is fun to watch in a bone-chilling sort of way, what with these people constituting a part of the electorate, and our economic fate turning on their ability to compete with the well-schooled populations of China, Germany, and India.

Part of the fun is the role Jay plays through it all, that of a responsible, erudite citizen, one who, along with the viewing audience, knows all the answers, because, come on, they are so fundamental. So the joke is between Jay and us, nodding at the stupidity of the people who step up to the microphone, and seem so unapologetic about their stupidity as they try to explain what continent Canada is on.

You can’t help but think it's great to stupid in America. All these people are having the time of their lives not knowing anything. They are well-dressed, they seem to be holding down jobs, perhaps protecting our country from attack. Making asses of themselves in front of 30 million people entails no direr consequences for them than having to say "My bad" into the camera. Stupidity is forgiving; it has to be, by definition.

"Jaywalking" by turns amuses and causes concern. But despite his brow-furrowing and parental clucking, it's a graceless performance by Leno. The odd thought isn’t that Americans can't be stupid; one has only to endure a political campaign to figure that out. No, the odd thought is that Jay Leno should set himself up as scorekeeper for what a civilized human in the 2000s ought to know.

Let's remind ourselves what Leno does for a living. Night after night, in his monologues, he simplifies what is happening around the world, often brutally. His take on the 2000 election (like that of many, but his take legitimized a cartoon view for all the media) was that it was between a liar (Gore) and a dope (Bush). Every joke about the campaign hit on one or the other of those two themes, or if it was a slow day, on a relapse to priapism (Clinton).

The jokes are incredibly obvious. An item in the news has implications about sex or sexual identity, or some consensual character flaw, and a celebrity is trotted out in the last sentence -- Michael Jackson, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Keith Richards -- to move the joke to higher ground. The premises float in like skeets in molasses, and one by one, Jay reduces them to their elemental smithereens.

I won’t comment on the interviews that come later in the program, because my mother has toddled off to bed by then, and I have switched the TV off.

The show is an exercise in comedic fetishism, recycling shtick no differently than the way Johnny Carson swung his imaginary golf club. Star Trek, in terms of going boldly where no one has gone before, it ain't. I notice that the jokes Jay he apologizes for, that get faint laughs, are sometimes the best -- but you have to think a moment to assemble them in your mind. Generally, they lack a celebrity to pin the humor on. It's too much for us to sort out.

So when Jay rolls his eyes at people who think Colin Powell is a member of the Backstreet Boys, like they don't get it, he doesn't get it.

There's a reason why lots of Americans are dumb. It's because they have watched dumb TV shows like his all their lives instead of reading, or thinking, or considering that they are actually a part of the world they know so little about, and that they are poorer for their flippant guesses.

How dare NBC, after all the witless and manipulative nonsense it has palmed off on the public over the last 50 years, camped out on airwaves that belong to the citizenry and that Congress has merely granted them a license, allowing them to make billions off the public largesse, after all the commercials, and laugh-tracks, and quiz shows, and news soundbites, after all the bias and pandering and mediocrity ...

How dare they make fun of us, when they made us this way?  

mfinley.com 
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2002
by MICHAEL FINLEY}