Americans Are Fat And Stupid

Filed under America, Election, Politics

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?

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2008-09-17  ::  Kevin Murphy