War On The Stupid, a rerun from 1999

I must be getting bored... I've decided to reprint an item I originally wrote November 13, 1999, one that seems just about as valid now as it did six years ago. It's called "War On The Stupid."

I said a couple of months ago that it was good that it was still legal to discriminate against stupid people. I'm starting to like doing it. And I don't apologize for it. I don't want to be around them, I don't want to smell the scent of old generic cigarettes and cheap perfume. I don't want to listen to their idiotic, mumbly-mouthed conversations. I don't want to look at their shitbox cars on the street. I don't want to pay taxes to support their stupid life choices or subsidize their uneducated flailings in the job and business world. I just want the stupid to be penned up somewhere, somewhere they can all enjoy each other and they won't get in the way of the people who do all the work, make all the rules, and do all the thinking.

The thing is, it's somewhat stupid of me to say this stuff here, since the stupid are generally excluded from the internet not by their inability to figure out their WebTV, but by their fish-eyed failure to even see the value of the internet. Or literacy. Or education. Or good quality manufactured items. Or history. Or art. Or science. Or anything that can't fit in their mouths, genital areas, noses, ears or asses.

Yeah, I'm talking about those stupid people. All of you who're able to read this can draw a deep, relieved breath... you're not the ones I'm talking about.

But just in case some member of the corps of the stupid has mistakenly stumbled onto the net and made it to this site...

You stupid fools think we, the smart people, can't figure out who you all are until you open your mouths, right? Wrong. We know who you are.

You're the people on the side of the road, hood up, steam pouring out from under the hood of your dead Aries K, as you look at it as if staring at it will magically heal the fan belt you never bothered to check and now can't recognize.

You're the people who get all worked up to your stupid friends about "rights" you don't have, and all your stupid friends marvel at your knowledge of the law.

You're the people who argue with cashiers about return policies that are posted in two languages on bright blue signs four feet high and printed on the receipt. You're arguing because you can't read it, but, of course, you think "you got rights."

You're the people who don't understand, or don't remember, where babies come from, and don't correlate that with your too-frequent moanings about how broke you are three days before payday.

You're the people down at the motor vehicle office looking goggle-eyed at the clerk who just told you you didn't fill out the form right, in spite of the printed directions on the form, and you'll have to do it over and go back in line.

You're the people who walk out of bars drunk and get hit by cars and killed.

You're the people with the coat sleeves covered with snot in February in the Midwest.

You're the people who interrupt meetings with irrelevant questions or questions that were answered ten minutes earlier.

You're the people who figure you're "entitled to something" because you walk around and breathe air.

Any attempt you could make to disguise yourselves will fail. Fail utterly. You're marked for life. Sure, yeah, you can come up with an example of some neighbor's kid who managed to overcome her stepfather's sneering disdain for education and maybe got out to get a degree from the local state college and move away. That kid was never stupid. "Educated" and "uneducated" are conditions which can be changed or modified, but stupid is for life. You might as well have a brand on your cheek, a big, hairless S.

Now, about the discrimination thing. It's about time that the smart people got together and just owned up to the likelihood that we're all tired of dealing with the stupid, and pass some apartheid-type laws to pen the stupid people somewhere they'll be safe, moderately productive, and most importantly out of our way.

I mean, think about it: the smart people are the ones who make all the rules, enforce all the rules, maintain the systems, and think up all the new stuff on earth. Yet every day, we end up having to spend a huge amount of our energy making allowances for the stupid:

• We have to pay taxes to support the criminally stupid in jail

• We have to build things into mechanical devices to keep the stupid from ripping their own faces off and suing us

• We have to pay higher insurance rates because all the stupid people are running into each other while they're picking their noses or looking for baby toys rolling around on the floor of the Geo Metro with three hubcaps

• We have to dumb down language in governmental publications so that they can be understood by the stupid, even though the stupid never read them

• We have to have Fox and UPN on our cable systems when we'd rather have The Travel Channel and ESPN2

• We have to remember that not everyone gets our jokes

• We pay extra taxes to pay for schools whose primary job is to separate the stupid from the smart while maintaining the charade that education is for everyone

• We have to stand behind the stupid in line at customer service while they feebly try to demand special privileges from a system set up by the smart people

...and on and on and on.

Why not just make it official? Just move all the stupid people to a special state all their own, one with no swimming pools, firearms, anything explosive, anything sharp, and anything that requires more than three syllables, put a fence around it, and go back to our lives. There's a huge inefficiency in mainstreaming the stupid, to give them the false illusion they'll ever amount to anything, in the risk that their idiocy will poison borderline smart people. Let's just admit that the smart people built the world, we own it, we run it, and we wanna enjoy it by ourselves for a while.

All you stupid people, just go away and quit bothering us.

Aha, wait, I hear the neurons rubbing together out there... that lone stupid person is thinking, slowly, "wait, smart people do stupid stuff...uh... sometimes..."

Tell you what: we'll put a big jar out in front of the town hall. When a stupid person does something stupid, they have to put a nickel in the jar and a smart person gets to take one out. When a smart person does something stupid, the reverse happens (wait, let me spell that out, in case you can't figure out what "reverse" means), only better: the smart person puts a nickel in and a random stupid person can take out ten dollars.

I predict that within three weeks the smart people will have every nickel in the entire country, and the mint will have to stamp out some more.

So, what do you say, smart people? Own up to just how much you enjoy discriminating against the truly stupid: how much you relish throwing away their job applications (with all the blanks filled in wrong or left empty), how much you like collecting checks from their car insurance companies, how much you enjoy exchanging knowing glances with the teller at the bank after the stupid person leaves... admit it!

It's the one group we can still legally discriminate against. Enjoy it while you can.