{"id":823,"date":"2007-02-19T00:47:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-19T00:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=823"},"modified":"2007-02-19T00:47:00","modified_gmt":"2007-02-19T00:47:00","slug":"welcome-to-uhh-merica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=823","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Uhh-merica"},"content":{"rendered":"

“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”<\/p>\n

Or maybe not. H.G. Wells put his own twist on it in his story “The Country of the Blind<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

The proverb’s questionable wisdom underlies Idiocracy<\/em><\/a>, a comedy with a plot right out of the Golden Age of science-fiction. <\/p>\n

Army Private Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson<\/a>), statistically average in every way, is volunteered for a hibernation experiment, but through bureaucratic snafus winds up 500 years in the future, where he is now the smartest man on the planet, in a society whose members are no longer able to keep things running and the crops growing — but what the hell, give ’em something to watch on the Violence Channel, and they are happy. (A prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph<\/a>), part of the same experiment, seems more willing to adapt.)<\/p>\n

It’s brutally funny. Watch, for instance, the degeneration of such familiar brand names as Costco, Carl’s Jr., and Fudrucker’s. (M. would say that they are plenty degenerate already.) And it’s also a sly plea for some kind of eugenics<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Or maybe not. H.G. Wells put his own twist on it in his story “The Country of the Blind.” The proverb’s questionable wisdom underlies Idiocracy, a comedy with a plot right out of the Golden Age of science-fiction. Army Private Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-dh","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":291,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=291","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":0},"title":"Idol-worshiping Episcopalians Christianity Today reacts\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 26, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Idol-worshiping Episcopalians Christianity Today reacts to Pagan aspects of an Episcopal Church experiment with women's liturgy. Other conservative Christian bloggers chime in: check out the \"comments\" section of this blog. The ordination of women led to \"sexual narcissism,\" you see. It's been a long time--like 40 or 50 years--since the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1256,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1256","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":1},"title":"J.K. Rowlings’ Effect on Our Language","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 25, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Recently M. and I started to experiment with geocaching. Since our rural home is adjacent to national forest land and located just off a designated Scenic Byway, it is a fertile spot\u2014there must be a dozen or more caches within five miles.But what I noticed when reading geocaching sites and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"weirdness\"","block_context":{"text":"weirdness","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=weirdness"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8929,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8929","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":2},"title":"Woody Guthrie Got It Wrong","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 14, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I went camping with some friends last weekend.((Note the general absence of snow, which is disturbing when you're up at 10,200 feet (3100 m.)). Some of my friends like to have music all the time, so there was a set of Bluetooth-enabled speakers and plenty of digitized music covering the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"capitalism\"","block_context":{"text":"capitalism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=capitalism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/sunset-9-Dec-2017_sm.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2456,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2456","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":3},"title":"Beatnik Witches","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 19, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Aidan Kelly's Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, which has circulated in digital form for some years, can now be purchased as a book from Amazon, with new material added. As the San Francisco counter-culture teeters on the edge of the Psychedelic Era, a group of twenty-somethings, open to spiritual experiment (and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1639,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1639","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":4},"title":"In which I am not the expert after all","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 25, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"A few days ago, a university student in Australia copied me on an email to an American Heathen reconstructionist: Hail! I sent the following to [name] seeking advice; perhaps you could offer some advice as well? It was about wishing to set up an Australian branch of the group, but\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":691,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=691","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":5},"title":"A Cultural History of Magic Mushrooms","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 26, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Andy Letcher's Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom is also on my to-buy list.Much stranger than the fictions it has inspired, the world of the magic mushroom is a place where shamans and hippies rub shoulders with psychiatrists, poets and international bankers.The magic mushroom was only rediscovered fifty\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"entheogens\"","block_context":{"text":"entheogens","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=entheogens"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0060828285","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}