PROFILES IN IGNORANCE: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. By Andy Borowitz. Simon & Schuster. 320 pages. $28.99.
If a nonfiction book has ever been written that qualifies as a hilarious tragedy, “Profiles in Ignorance” is that book. It’s hilarious because it’s packed with astonishingly dumb stuff people have said, and it’s tragic because those people were and are some of America’s most important elected officials.
Author Borowitz’s thesis is that the bar for our political leaders has been getting lower and lower over the last half-century, a process he calls the “Three Stages of Ignorance.” He defines those chronological stages as ridicule, when dumb politicians pretended to be smart; acceptance, when dumb politicians felt free to appear dumb; and celebration, when smart politicians pretended to be dumb. Borowitz chose these leaders to define the stages:
Ridicule: “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.”
Acceptance: “George W. Bush, who made ignorance his brand, and Sarah Palin, who made it her business.”
Celebration: “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.”
Borowitz fully admits all his choices are Republicans, but he doesn’t apologize for it. He names many Democrats who could be contenders, such as Marion Barry for smoking crack, Rod Blagojevich for trying to sell a Senate seat, and John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner and Andrew Cuomo, for letting a certain part of their body do the thinking though they were “seemingly endowed with functioning brains. But, Borowitz says, they do not come close to equaling the Republicans.
Borowitz is an internationally known comedian, New York Times bestselling author, and political satirist. But this book is not satire, even if he does occasionally pepper his telling with unnecessary sarcasm that tends to cheapen his effort a bit. For the most part, though, he sticks to listing scores of really dumb quotes spoken by America’s highest elected officials, and quotes about them from their associates. Here’s just a small sample:
Ronald Reagan: “Eighty percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees.”
Dan Quale: “For NASA, space is still a high priority” and “(I)t’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.”
George W. Bush: After being told most Iraqis were Sunnis or Shiites, he replied, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”
Trump: Borowitz spends 54 pages discussing the difference between how Trump describes himself and how those close to him describe him. Borowitz reminds us of Trump’s suggestion that COVID victims should drink disinfectant to cure themselves.
But “Profiles in Ignorance” is not all laugh-till-you-cry. Borowitz closes his book with a deadly serious look, not at the officials themselves, but at the real culprits: us, the voters who elect them.
His point is that too many of us — and here he includes himself among the guiltiest — think we are participating in politics by just keeping up with current events and discussing them with our friends or posting our opinions on Twitter. But by doing only that, he says, we’re just spectators who make no difference in electoral outcomes, just as football fans watching the Super Bowl make no difference in the game’s outcome. Only those who do the hard work and participate in the field really count.
What is Borowitz’s solution to electing dunces? For that, he turns to the political scientist Eitan Hersh, who “urges us to dial back our day-to-day surveillance of national politics, roll up our sleeves, and get to work on the local level. Attend town meetings. Organize. Get out the vote.
Reviewer Skip Johnson is a Charleston-based writer and editor.
