Fox News’s Carl Cameron:
She didn’t understand, McCain aides told me today, that Africa was a continent and not a country, and actually asked them, they say, if South Africa was just part of the country as opposed to a country in the continent.
Forty-six percent, people. Forty-six percent.
Full segment here:
:: Read on
Every time I’ve picked up a newspaper or turned on the news recently, my baby nephew has pointed, smiled and exclaimed: “Bamma!”
Bamma is one of the three things he likes. The other two are police cars and Bob the Builder.
Smart kid. He doesn’t know what Bamma is, or what his policies are, but my nephew can tell, instinctively, that Bamma is a good ‘un.
It seems that 46% of voting Americans couldn’t grasp that simple truth.
I’m not saying that my 20-month-old nephew, whose entire vocabulary is currently only about 100 words, almost all of them nouns, is smarter than 46% of Americans.
He is that, obviously. But I’m not saying that.
I’m saying that while the world is understandably relieved at Obama’s victory, and while I would like to offer my personal thanks to America for not fucking it up this time around, I’d hardly call this election result a sweeping endorsement of the country’s intellectual judgement.
That a small majority of the electorate chose the IQ ticket is definitely good news for the human race. But as I went to bed last night I did so thinking that anything less than an absolute, crushing, unequivocal rejection of McCain, Palin, the Republican party and the eight horrifying years of Bush, would not be enough to atone for 2004.
When I awoke to discover that a slouching biomass the size of something like the population of the UK was prepared to risk a Sarah Palin presidency, I felt a little vomit come up in the back of my throat.
Even McCain, in his concession address, seemed to be appalled and repulsed by his own petulant, braying redneck supporters.
His surprisingly overt reference to Obama’s race at first struck me as an oddly patronising headliner for his speech, before I realised that he was not addressing Obama, or even black people in general. He was addressing his audience, the blinkered, slobbering cretins who routinely humiliated him with their wilfully ignorant or racist outbursts during his campaign rallies.
It seemed to me that perhaps McCain, who genuinely seems like a nice bloke, was trying to make amends in some way, to distance himself from the Bibles-and-guns idiots that nowadays seem to comprise the entirety of the Republican “base”.
“Look, just don’t shoot the guy,” he appeared to be saying.
I wonder if they’ll listen.
And I wonder: how long before the Secret Service demand a pay raise?
In one of his live shows, British comedian Jimmy Carr asks his audience to shout out two adjectives to describe French people. He explains that every time he does the show, the audience yells the same two words.
The audience calls out “smelly” and “rude”. Snap!
When he asks for two words to describe Americans, the two words are always “fat” and “stupid”.
He goes on to ask for suggestions for two adjectives we could randomly apply to people from, say, Chad or Belize or Kyrgyzstan.
I described this Carr bit to a group of American friends, last year in a San Francisco beer garden, and invited them to pick two words for the English.
It was creepy how quickly they, with remarkable synchronicity, came up with “snobby” and “effeminate”, or words to that effect (might have been “annoying fags”).
Disturbingly, these were people who’d met me.
Because I’m English, I also grew up to believe Americans are stupid. It was a given, never challenged. Even now, there’s no cheaper gag for a British standup comic, columnist or celebrity panelist than to imply that the yanks are all a few Quayles short of a Bush.
It’s all bollocks, of course.
In eight years in the US, I met hundreds of Americans, and I know for a fact that they’re individually no stupider than people from anywhere else.
I’ve met dozens of really smart Americans, just as I’ve met dozens of really idiotic Brits.
But…
But.
Collectively, America is stupid.
Get a sufficient number of averagely intelligent Americans in a room, say a room the size of the Republican National Convention, or Kansas, and their IQs drop faster than an erection in a baby abattoir.
How else to explain away polls suggesting the country is about to elect Weekend At Bernie’s into the highest office in the land, even with the knowledge that, the moment his chemo runs out, or his dicky ticker stops pumping, Martha Stewart gets to be the POTUS.
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so terrifying.
This isn’t American Idol. You don’t vote for president based on who’s sassiest, or who has the cutest spouse, or who hunts and goes to church the most or who reminds you most of an old high-school home-ec teacher you had a crush on.
Whoever you give the job to will have the power of life and death over hundreds of millions of people.
Not just Americans. What happens if the abstinence-loving mother-of-five-grandmother-at-44 decides to stop sending condoms to sub-Saharan Africa? Tries to bring about the Second Coming by persuading Israel to nuke Tehran? Invades Venezuela?
Have we learned nothing from Bush?
Surely, the American electorate is scarier than Al Qaeda.
Please, America, don’t get us killed. Don’t risk Palin as president. Just tell the rest of the world what you want. We’ll give you anything. African diamonds. Japanese cars. Swedish women. German beer. Thai marijuana. Russian caviare. The finest Colombian cocaine. The best of English… um…
You can have Canada. Please, take it, we weren’t using it anyway.
We’ll all promise to eat at Mickey D’s every day. We’ll try to enjoy country music. We’ll grow mullets and wear our trousers round our ankles and say sidewalk and burglarize and put the month before the day and buy stocks and do drive-bys and watch Fox News with a straight face and drink Bud and take Prozac and sue someone and ride in pickups to hunt flighty woodland herbivores with Uzis and say grace and call each other dude and complain about gas prices and get breast implants and develop restless leg syndrome and put cheese on everything…
We’ll pretend American football is a real sport.
Just name it, it’s yours.
What are your demands?