A Poster Icon for American Stupidity

I thought about weighing in on the current controversy surrounding Rush Limbaugh, but why bother? Thinking and writing about Rush is like wrestling with a pig— it makes me feel tired and dirty, and the pig likes it. He thrives on criticism. And here’s the sad and terrible thing about Limbaugh— he will never go away. Even after he dies, dittoheads will experience Limbaugh “sightings” in the same way that believers do with Elvis and The Virgin Mary.

The dittoheads don’t seem to realize that their hero is really just a comedian, like Jon Stewart, but without any sense of humor or appreciation of the comedy in the absurd, and for this reason I was going to nominate the average, cross-sectional dittohead as the iconic poster person for American stupidity. But then along came Nadya Suleman and Sandra Herold.

For those unfamiliar with these two names, Nadya Suleman is known as the “octomom.” Her claim to fame is that she expects society to pay the million-dollar medical bill for delivering her fatherless and ultimately-doomed octuplets which she brought into the world because she damn well felt like it. If that seems to qualify as stupid, Sandra Herold’s story is even worse. Her pet 200-pound male chimpanzee chewed the hands and face off a lady friend of Sandra Herold, literally eating her alive because she was perceived as a threat in a sex triangle. Sandra had taught the chimp to shower with her and sleep with her, and presumably share a cigarette after it was all over.

For most of a million years, human beings have practiced heterosex and homosex and procreation in a way that’s remained pretty much unchanged over time, and everybody seemed okay with that status quo until these two head-case women came along to prove that in 21st Century America, there is no limit to what stupid people can do.