Opinion – Lúcia Guimarães: Book explains how ignorance became an electoral advantage

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Who thought South America was the name of a country?

Who described the African continent as a nation?

Who said that global warming was an invention of China to destroy the competitiveness of American industry?

There were three Republicans who had their finger on the nuclear button — in the order of blunders, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

Every country has its history of fun-loving politicians. But there comes a time when the laughter is interrupted by fear of the damage that the powerful and the stupid are capable of doing.

A book released this week in the US examines the evolution of the current crop of donkey rulers. Comedian Andy Borowitz is the author of “Profiles in Ignorance, How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber”. The book is a forensic and 100% factual examination of the recent version of the anti-intellectual tradition, a well-known aspect of American history.

Borowitz thinks the modern pioneer of the stellar muzzle 50 years ago was Reagan, the B-movie actor whose ignorance was so blatant that his 1966 California gubernatorial campaign hired university psychologists to train him like an animal. laboratory. Accustomed to memorizing movie lines, Reagan learned to repeat what his instructors wrote on index cards and won the election by more than 1 million votes.

The campaign aide responsible for the Reagan fact-bathing failed when he was asked to do the same by then Senator Dan Quayle in 1984. Texan columnist Molly Ivins accompanied Quayle on the campaign trail and concluded that George Bush Sr. it was more stupid than it looked. “If you implant Dan Quayle’s brain in a bee, it starts flying in reverse,” she declared.

Reagan and Quayle, writes Borowitz, represent the first of three stages of inculturation in politics: the ridiculous, a wistful period when leaders could be embarrassed by saying bullshit.

The second stage—acceptance—has George W. Bush as its patron. He thought his idiocy was benign and brought him closer to the crowd. Bush was proud to reveal that he had not opened a book while studying at Yale University. In 2000, the Republican campaign spread a slogan—”George Bush is running for president, not a quiz show seat”—suggesting that his opponent, the relatively pompous environmentalist Al Gore, was at a disadvantage because of his culture.

Bush showed the power of intellectual unpreparedness to bring about mass death. Days after invading Iraq, he received a delegation of Iraqis in the Oval Office and, for the first time, heard that there were both Shias and Sunnis in the country. Bewildered, he exclaimed, “And I thought Iraqis were Muslims!”

The third stage of ignorance is celebration, which plagues both Washington and Brasilia. Trump, Borowitz concludes, is profoundly ignorant, but he exhibits, like the silly captain of the Plateau, what psychologists call an “island of competence”: the ability to attract attention by uttering verbal dung. At its current stage, a Harvard doctorate, like the one displayed by Republican Trumpists, is no impediment to trying to convince voters to take horse medicine for Covid.

The only antidote to our age of obscurantism is voting.

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