Off and running in many directions, I see!

I've started reading the satirist Andy Borowitz's Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. In the introduction he discusses the subjects of the book, with a few paragraphs I'll share here.

To believe that Trump's presidency came out of nowhere, without warning, is the political version of creationism. I, on the other hand, believe in devolution. The election of a serially bankrupt, functionally illiterate reality TV host was the logical consequence of the five decades preceding it, which, with apologies to Edith Wharton, I'll call the Age of Ignorance. How did the bar for our political figures fall so far? To better Understand this heinous half century, I've divided it into the Three Stages of Ignorance: Ridicule, Acceptance, and Celebration.

During the Ridicule stage, ignorance was a magnet for mockery, a serious flaw that could kill a political career. Consequently, dumb politicians pretend to be smart. I'll profile two politicians who navigated this perilous stage with radically different outcomes: Ronald Reagan, whose gift as a TV performer helped hide his cluelessness, and Dan Quayle, who shared Reagan's cluelessness but not his knack for hiding it.

During the Acceptance stage, ignorance mutated into something more agreeable: a sign that a politician was authentic, down-to-earth, and a "normal person." Consequently, dumb politicians felt free to appear dumb. In this stage, I'll profile George W. Bush, who made ignorance his brand, and Sarah Palin, who made it her business model.

Finally, during the Celebration stage—the ordeal we're enduring right now—ignorance has become preferable to knowledge, dunces are exalted over experts, and a candidate can win a seat in Congress after blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers. Being ill-informed is now a litmus test; consequently smart politicians must pretend to be dumb. I'll profile the ultimate embodiment of this stage, Donald J. Trump, and Trump wannabes such as Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis—who, despite being graduates of our nation's finest universities, strenuously try to outdumb him. . . . while Democratic dopes have wreaked their share of havoc, the scale of their destruction doesn't equal that of their Republican counterparts. Once Democrats gin up a two-trillion-dollar war to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, ignore and then politicize a virus that causes nearly a million needless deaths, and attempt a violent overthrow of the U.S. government, I'll get cracking on a book about them.