Lowballing the Averages

I should have taken a picture, but I suck at that. On a recent visit to Rochester, MN for my wife’s check-up at the Mayo Clinic there, I saw a Trump supporter sign with “this is our 1776” statement somewhere in the general Trumpanzee gibberish. All the way home, I thought about that sign and the goober who paid for it. The 1776 conservatives were also known as “Tories, Royalists, Loyalists, or King's Men”: aka supporters of King George. Next up were the 1863 conservatives who revolted against the US government and national law and started the Civil War with an attack on Fort Sumpter and seceding from the Union. Realistically, those “conservatives” were clearly traitors. The late-1930’s US conservatives were generally positively inclined toward Adolph Hitler and even the attack on Pearl Harbor and the bombing of London didn’t convince them otherwise. One of the classic 20^th Century Republican conservatives, Senator Joe McCarthy, spent his first term in the Senate freeing convicted Nazi war criminals. In the 70s, conservatives lined up, first, behind Goldwater who wanted to start WWIII to see who had the most atomic weapons and, second, behind the record-setting criminal-producing Nixon administration. Reagan, the conservatives’ patron saint jabbered about economic responsibly while he created the US’s international debt flushing billions down his Star Wars toilet and generally spending money like it was falling from trees.

I have to admit I was surprised to see so many Trump signs in Rochester. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been. Rochester is where Minnesota Republican Party Chair Jennifer Carnahan is from and she’s the humorless nutjob who said, “We are jumping through the roof with excitement to welcome our great and fearless leader, President Donald J. Trump, back to Minnesota next week.” How someone from Minnesota would miss the connection between that statement and the Russian spies, Boris and Natasha, from Rocky and Bullwinkle blows me away.

What I have decided, based on long and careful observation and a growing cynicism—that the last 4 years have fed and over-fed—is that as smart as people are in a given area there has to be an equally stupid pool to keep the average . . . well, average. Rochester, MN residents possess an exceptional number of college degrees and Masters and higher degrees compared to the state, but Rochester has slightly more high school dropouts than the state average, too. The city has some of the nation’s most brilliant doctors, scientists, engineers, and managers and some of the freakin’ dumbest faux-conservatives on the planet to offset the city’s brilliance.

You could make an argument for avoiding ultra-educated cities because you’ll also be surrounded by hyper-idiots who leech off of the productive members of their society and whose purpose appears to be only to drive the average IQ to the national mean. That won’t work, though. The half-wits who call themselves “conservatives” are everywhere. You, literally, can’t find a place in this country that isn’t infested with the conspiracy sheep, racists, entitled and uneducated underachievers, and general purpose fools. We’ve been breeding them for centuries.