Stupid-Americans Are The New Irish-Americans. Trump is Their JFK.

Ask now how moronic your country can be for you, but how idiotic...

A while back I asked my 79 year-old uncle what it was like on the day that man landed on the moon.

(Real talk: The most terrifying non-Donald-Trump-related thing that’s happened to me in the last few years is a mild but persistent case of age-related family history curiosity.)

My Uncle asked me what year that was. 1969, I said. He remembered 1969: That was the year that he was chasing Jewish girls at city college and driving a buttercup VW Beetle. Yeah, he said, the moon landing, that was something.

My uncle’s parents, my grandparents, were both Irish immigrants. The universe of my uncle’s childhood was a neighborhood full of Irish immigrants in the Bronx where the Irish bars were across the street from St. John’s Church, around the block Hibernian clubs and down Broadway from Gaelic Park, where in the few seconds they had between cigarettes, guys with names like Lefty Divine called games of Irish stickball on screechy microphones. So I asked my uncle, well what was it like when John F Kennedy was elected?

And through his eyes I could almost see his brain get into a DeLorean and crackle back to mid-November 1960. He beamed.

“Oh it was the best,” my uncle said, shaking his head. “We were on top of the world, the whole neighborhood was. What we were was the best thing you could be. Everyone knew that we were going to heaven and everyone else (author’s note: protestants) were going to hell. It was amazing.”

So to summarize: The crowning scientific and technological achievement of 300,000 years of human evolution that allowed mankind to step off the planet and towards the stars - a solid B. A guy who kinda reminded you of yourself making it to the top of the social and political hill: That. Was. Everything.

I don’t mean to pick on my uncle. This is how people are. It’s how many of them are today.

Except today the new ethnicity is not Irish or Bengali or Venezuelan. It’s stupid. Stupid-Americans are the new Irish-Americans. And Donald Trump is their JFK.

From the Paleolithic age up to the very very recent past, stupidity was an act. You put your pants on backwards and then lost your car keys because you thought you put them in your back pocket but your back pocket was actually on the front. A little stupid happened to everybody. If stupid happened to you regularly then you had a condition. Being congenitally stupid, as a good number of people were, you tried to keep it out of view as best you could, like a rash you couldn’t clear up.

Which is kind of how being gay was seen back then: A weird and shameful quirk that no one could quite explain and few people wanted to own. But gay became an ethnicity too.

Back when my Uncle was working at Gaelic Park after school, there were millions of young men his age who would have loved to share the back seat of a convertible with John Kennedy (maybe on Sunday afternoon drive in Hyannisport, probably not Dallas) but approximately zero of them would have admitted it. Until all that changed. A few people who’d been told to keep their homosexuality to themselves just…didn’t. The lock was picked, the closet door sprang open, and people who had a powerful shared experience but didn’t realize they shared it suddenly did. Individual homosexuals became the gay community, and pretty quickly after that, an ethnicity.

Yes: Gay is an ethnicity. They have a flag. They have parades. They have clubs and bars and civic organizations and scholarships and even some neighborhoods. They have heroes and group mythologies. They recognize other gay people even before they’ve met. Sure it’s not a typical ethnicity. They don’t have their own language (but there’s definitely slang), or an “old gay country” (though they do have Provincetown, and it is lovely this time of year) and I was going to say they don’t have a cuisine of their own but I don’t know what else you’d call brunch.

That same process is happening now with stupid people. They’re transcending their individual limitations, finding each other and becoming out-and-proud Stupid-Americans.

(Because “stupid” is a pretty stupid term, I should probably take a minute here to describe what I mean. It’s not really a matter of raw IQ, and educational achievement only partially captures it. Stupid people are those who don’t understand what is happening around them and have no interest in actually finding out. Active ignorance would be another way of putting it, but “stupid” just sounds better. Despite being very well informed about electrons and such, a competent chemical engineer with a master’s degree could be very stupid indeed if he/she still believes that trickle down economics is a real thing.)

How individual stupid Americans are becoming the collective, self-aware group of Stupid-Americans is a great idea for a lot of very fancy journalism I’m sure. It’s probably got something to do with the internet, where stupid people can find and repeat stupid things to each other over and over and over again. But whatever the processes are, they’re surely processing. The main thing that makes this development less obvious than it would otherwise be is that while Irish people use the word “Irish” about themselves, and gay people use “gay” - stupid people don’t, for reasons of basic self-esteem, describe themselves as “stupid.” Instead they call themselves things like “real Americans”, “patriots” and “independent thinkers” to connect and explain facts that they’ve known about themselves their whole lives: like how much of what socially recognized “smart people” seem to say feels boring, confusing and annoying and how people’s faces change expression when they, the stupid, try to share their own opinions on things. Lately, stupid people have been redefining themselves, attributing the shame and inadequacy they feel in these moments to the corruption, blindness and arrogance of sources and voices that they don’t understand. They do this because they are stupid.

But still you gotta feel for them: You know how unpleasant it is to feel like you don’t understand what everyone else is talking about, to have things explained to you twice, to feel like your opinions don’t matter and that you’ve been written off. And knowing that, it’s not far to imagine what a light in the darkness it must seem when someone who is just like you comes in and changes everything.

If written language survives the next six weeks, we’ll be writing about Donald Trump for a thousand years. But whatever else there is to say, the most important thing about Donald Trump, the thing that is obvious from watching him speak for just 14 seconds, is that he is profoundly stupid. Whatever it is that he might be talking about or doing at any given moment, it’s clear that while he has a reptilian instinct for reading and stoking conflict, he has no real idea what’s going on and he doesn’t really care to. Stupid is what he is and where he comes from. It is his mind and his soul. Catholic was what JFK was. Gay was what Harvey Milk was. Stupid is who Donald Trump is.

And that’s what they love most, the Stupid-American voters.

Remember that sentence you heard at the beginning of all this in 2016? “He’s just saying what everybody is thinking.”

But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were. And suddenly, in an instant, the most powerful man on earth was thinking just like them. With his clueless smirk and unstoppable rise, he turned people whose stupidity made them feel like nobody into people who felt like everybody.

That’s why he’ll never lose him. Because it was never about what he did or didn’t do. All that stuff is very confusing and the Stupid-American community isn’t interested in the details. They love him for who he is, which is one of them, and because he shows them every day that Stupid-Americans can reach the social mountaintop.

There’s this story we tell ourselves over and over and over again in this country: A new group of immigrants arrive or emerges and everyone else dumps on them. They face discrimination and miserable conditions but they persevere: They work hard, they organize, they assimilate to America and America assimilates to them, they grow, they contribute, they become proud of their new hyphenated selves and then one day, they break that last barrier. This is a story we can tell without words. This is a story we feel. This story is who we are. It’s in there so deep that you almost find yourself rooting for Stupid-Americans.

But then you look on your phone and see that a guy with an active brainworm has just banned vaccines, and the head of FEMA didn’t know that hurricane season was a thing, and we just started another war in the Middle East because an elderly man thought Israeli missiles looked wicked cool on TV. And somehow life just keeps going on.