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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. For those of you who read President John F. Kennedy's classic book Profiles in Courage, comes something of a sequel from New Yorker Magazine satirist, Andy Borowitz. It's called Profiles in Ignorance. You know Andy Borowitz from his New Yorker column, The Borowitz Report. Some of the latest headlines from The Borowitz Report include, Dr. Oz Claims That Eating Classified Documents was Essential to Trump's Health Diet, and Nation's Armed Insurrectionists Say Biden's Pro-democracy Speech Hurt Their Feelings, and Student Loan Forgiveness Inspires Giuliani to Apply to Law School.
Those are just some passing bits of wit from Andy Borowitz. The book gives us something with more permanence and weight, the Andy Borowitz treatment of decades of American history for real. The full title is Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. There is a thesis in the book that over the last 50 years, American politicians have become increasingly allergic to knowledge. This is also the rare comedy book, maybe history's first comedy book, with 60 pages of footnotes, I will note. If that's not too much of a buzz kill, we are delighted that Andy Borowitz is back with us now. Hi, Andy. Congratulations on the book and welcome back to WNYC.
Andy Borowitz: Thank you, Brian. Really, no one has to read those footnotes. I just put that in to make sure everyone knew I had done my homework and this was full of real facts. Albeit funny real facts.
Brian: I did what I sometimes do with long articles. I read the first two and the last two. I'll start at the beginning, I guess, why profiles in ignorance?
Andy: I did a comedy tour, because I do some standup comedy when I'm not writing for the New Yorker and writing other things. I did a tour that actually you participated in a little bit, as I recall. We did a show together in Stamford, I believe.
Brian: You did, in Connecticut.
Andy: That's right. The name of my tour was Make America Not Embarrassing Again. The point was that we had an extremely embarrassing person in the White House, I felt. It was a moment when I was going through American history in my standup, when I started talking about Sarah Palin. I talked about her interview with Katie Couric and how Katie Couric asked her if there was any Supreme Court decision besides Roe v. Wade that she disagreed with. Sarah Palin came up totally empty and I was like, "Come on. You can't think of anything? Ali versus Frazier, nothing?"
I realized that this moment was a pivotal moment in American history because, we didn't know it at the time, but Sarah Palin was the gateway ignoramus who led to Donald Trump. She lowered the bar to make Donald Trump seem not really that implausible as a presidential candidate.
During the lockdown, we all had various projects. We baked, I played some Wordle. Maybe you played some Wordle, too. I started thinking about this whole issue of lowering the bar and ignorance. I decided to do a very forensic study. I got a lot of history books out and I tried to figure out when this trend of politicians knowing less and less started. I landed really in 1966, which was the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California.
It was really those 50 years book ended between his election in California and Trump's election in 2016. Then the inheritors of Trump, the children of Trump, like Marjorie Taylor Green, and Matt Gates, and the people we're dealing with now. It's a funny book, but it will also make you cry. It will make you laugh and cry. One reviewer said it makes you laugh, cry, and swear, all at the same time. I think that gives you some picture of what the book is.
Brian: I think I would do that, too. I agree with that review. You opened the book with two quotes, one from Harry Truman and one from Donald Trump. Truman said, "Being dumb is just about the worst thing there is when it comes to holding high office." Trump said, "The worst thing a man can do is go bald." Are those real quotes or are you just being a wise guy?
Andy: Those are real quotes. I should reiterate, Brian, for those who are listening, people know me as a guy who makes stuff up. I make stuff up in the New Yorker every day when I write The Borowitz Report. Although, I admit sometimes it sounds real, unfortunately, but in this book I made nothing up. This book is 100% true, but I had some of the best comedy writers in history working for me like Dan Quayle, for example, whose jokes really can't be improved upon. He didn't mean them to be funny. When I set out to do this, I realized you really didn't have to make things up and it would be better if I didn't, because I can actually entertain and perhaps even teach a little bit at the same time.
Brian: Hence, the 60 pages of footnotes at the end for when somebody--
Andy: You're destroying my book sales every time you mention those 60 pages. I have to say as an advisory to the reader, ignore those 60 pages. Just enjoy the ride.
Brian: There's 250 pages before you get to them to enjoy.
Andy: That's right.
Brian: You divide the rise of ignorance into three stages, reminiscent of the five stages of grief, I guess, the three stages of public ignorance: ridicule, acceptance, and celebration. Let's start at the beginning. What happens in the ridicule stage?
Andy: On the ridicule stage, which happened not so long ago, we still expected our politicians to know things and they were ridiculed if they didn't know things. In that phase, dumb politicians had to pretend to be smart. Shall I move on to acceptance?
Brian: Ronald Reagan takes up some serious real estate in the ridicule stage, right?
Andy: Yes, he does. He and Dan Quayle are two icons of the ridicule stage. Now, Ronald Reagan is very revered these days. People are always saying, when they talk about Donald Trump, they'll say, "What has happened to the party of Ronald Reagan?" I thought it was probably worthwhile to take another look at Ronald Reagan and ask the question, what did Ronald Reagan know exactly? How knowledgeable or ignorant was he? Well, Ronald Reagan didn't know that South America was composed of different countries. He couldn't divide 45 by 9, and he thought that all the nuclear waste produced by a nuclear power plant could be stored under a desk. Just to name three things that he thought were true.
Now, Ronald Reagan in 1966, when he ran for governor, he was a constant target for ridicule and scorn. He was considered a joke, he was a has-been actor, TV host, and there was this coterie of California millionaires, Republicans, who surrounded him, who wanted to promote him as a candidate because they had learned from the Kennedy-Nixon debates that it was really important to be good on TV. One thing about Ronald Reagan, he had spent a lot of time on TV.
Brian: He was good on TV.
Andy: Really good at that. They reverse-engineered this problem. Rather than find a politician who knew a lot and try to make him good on TV, they said, "We'll find somebody who's just good on TV, and then load him with enough knowledge that he seems not like a figure of ridicule. Somebody who knows enough that he might be considered a governor." They actually hired a bunch of psychologists from UCLA, this is all true, who did this kind of Clockwork Orange treatment on Ronald Reagan and they prepped him. Fortunately, for them, Ronald Reagan, based on his previous occupation, was really good at memorizing stuff.
They came up with cue cards. They taught him enough about California to make him seem credible. The outcome was that he won the election by a million votes. It was a landslide. This really sent a very dangerous message. This sent the message that it was really important to be good on TV and not so important to know stuff because Ronald Reagan was very ignorant.
Now, the guy who was his tutor, his Henry Higgins, was a guy named Stu Spencer. In 1988, Stu Spencer had a similar challenge because he was put in charge of the campaign of Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle was the vice presidential nominee on the Republican ticket. He's mainly known, of course, for misspelling the word potato, in a middle school spelling bee that he supervised.
Dan Quayle was the dark side of the ridicule phase, which is that Stu Spencer, who had so much success playing Henry Higgins to Ronald Reagan's Eliza Doolittle, totally failed when it came to Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle was uneducable. Every time he opened his mouth, he would say something like "Republicans support bondage between parents and children." He would say stuff like that, and he really couldn't sound smart to save his life. Molly Ivins, the late great humorist who every comedian lives in her shadow, she actually followed Dan Quayle on the campaign trail and she said he was dumber than advertised. In her words, she said, "If you put that man's brain in a bumblebee, it would fly backwards."
That was Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle was the dark side of the ridicule phase but the ridicule phase was basically that period where you would take a dumb politician who looked good on TV and you would try to make them seem smart.
Brian: I'm happy to say that in her life, Molly Ivins would come on this show sometimes, and with her Texas accent and populist Southern charm, she would make fun of one of our local newspapers. She would refer to things, "In your local newspaper, the New York City Times," and go on from this.
Andy: She wrote for them very briefly. There's a great documentary about Molly, and Molly actually wrote Elvis's obituary in the New York Times. She was briefly in the newsroom and they looked around the newsroom for somebody who would know something about Elvis. She was the only one in the newsroom who was vaguely Southern. They sent her down to Memphis to cover his funeral. It was, I think, on the front page, a little trivia about Molly Ivins.
Brian: Andy Borowitz, is with us, satirist for The New Yorker, as you may know him and his new book is called Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. As Andy has told us, this is a non-fiction book. It's certainly his jaundiced eye irreverent take, but this is real history taking us through what he calls the three stages of ignorance in America: ridicule, acceptance, and celebration.
We're going to go on to stage two here in a minute, and listeners, we probably have some time for some phone calls for Andy Borowitz. Your questions, reactions, political theories, lame attempts at one-liners to compete with him. Any of those, welcome here for New Yorker magazine satirist and now author, Andy Borowitz, around Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. By the way, I will mention now and at the end, that Andy will be doing a live Profiles in Ignorance show this Thursday night at Symphony Space on the upper west side. You can buy an in-person ticket or a live streaming ticket.
They also have, I see, a reduced in-person ticket price for people under 30. That's Thursday night at Symphony Space, with Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance, live on stage. I will also note as a little footnote of my own. Since you mentioned Katie Couric and her interview, I guess that was 2008 with Sarah Palin. Katie Couric is going to be a guest today on All of It with Alison Stewart, following us. For you, Katie Couric fans out there whose ears might have perked up at that reference, just a little plug there for Alison's show.
All right, let's keep moving through the three stages of ignorance that you chronicle in the book. We did phase one, the ridicule phase. Phase two is the acceptance phase. Who's accepting what?
Andy: The acceptance phase is different from ridicule. In ridicule, dumb politicians had to seem smart. In the acceptance phase, ignorance took on a more pleasant patina, if you will. It was a more positive thing to have because ignorance made a candidate seem like a regular guy, somebody you'd want to have a beer with, not some hoity-toity, pointy-headed intellectual. The first real, I would say icon or father of the acceptance phase was George W. Bush. Now, I point out in the book, George W. Bush knew just about as little as Dan Quayle. As a matter of fact, I have a quiz in the book called Bush or Quail, where you try to tell them apart, it's very difficult.
They belong to the same fraternity, the DKE, which at different places, different colleges, but the DKE is-- and maybe some DKE listeners out there would object to this, but it's known for being an academically challenged frat. He said that he never opened a book at Yale, that he didn't pay attention at Yale, but he wasn't trying to hide this. We're in the acceptance phase now. He broadcasts this as symbols of his normalness. He wasn't condescending like his opponent, Al Gore, who was painted as an intellectual, the guy who said he invented the internet, which by the way, Al Gore never said, that was just a fabrication.
What happened with George W. Bush is that early in his campaign, some people in the media realized that he knew nothing. A guy in Boston who had a radio show named Andy Hiller, decided to give him a foreign policy pop quiz. He asked him basically who the names of the leaders of four different countries were. George W. Bush got three out of four questions wrong. Now, had this been Dan Quayle in 1988, this would've been like his potato. This would've been, "Oh my God. This guy is not in any way qualified to be president," but the Bush campaign did a very smart thing. His press secretary, Karen Hughes came out and said, "George W. Bush is running for president of the United States, not Jeopardy contestant."
They made it seem as though somebody who knew stuff was actually an elitist, a know-it-all, all the things that they tried make Al gore victimized by those kinds of labels. George W. Bush, once he realized this was working for him, he really leaned into it. He went around saying, "I may not know very much, but blah, blah, blah." How much did George W. Bush not know? Well, as president of the United States, within days before he invaded Iraq, he had a meeting with some Iraqis in the Oval Office, and they were telling him about the various factions within Iraq. At this meeting, it was the first time George W. Bush had ever heard of Sunnis and Shiites, he had never heard of them before.
His reaction was, "I thought the Iraqis were Muslims." This is an example of how ignorance is funny, and also seriously not funny because his ignorance resulted in one of the most cataclysmic presidencies in our history until, well, recently. The other person who's really an icon of the acceptance stage is in fact, Sarah Palin, because Sarah Palin knew so little.
She thought we were at war in Iran, which we never were. She thought that Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11, which he didn't. You could go down the list. She thought that the late Queen Elizabeth, who we've been hearing a lot about lately, was the commander of the British armed forces. She'd never heard of Margaret Thatcher.
The list goes on, but the point is in the acceptance phase, Sarah Palin, again, made the fact that she didn't know all of this stuff, a symbol of her being authentic. Remember, she was just an average hockey mom, and she kept on saying that over and over again. I think it's great that there are moms who take their kids to hockey games. I'm not sure how that qualifies you to be vice president of the United States, have no idea.
Brian: To your point, and you have so many entertaining stories in the book from real life about George Bush parading his ignorance, and how he was a C student in school and all of that stuff, as a political plus for him on the trail, listener tweets, praising you, says, "I love hearing Borowitz properly used words such as uneducable to refer to our most idiotic politicians in speaking with Brian Lehrer." It reminded me that you had something in the book about Bush calling someone out for using a big fancy pretentious word. The word was multitasking.
Andy: [laughs] Yes.
Brian: Did that really happen?
Andy: It really happened. That was a reporter of The Washington Post or The Times, one or the other. It was really interesting because again, going back to Quayle in the 1988 debate with Lloyd Bentsen, which was his complete train wreck, that's the, "You're no JFK" moment that will live in infamy for Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle actually went out of his way to use long words. He said, "When you're president, you have to know about telemetry." He kept on these long words to try to sound smart, but by the time he got to Bush, two decades later, he was making fun of people who used, not incredibly long words like multitasking.
Brian: Brian in Springfield, New Jersey, or on WNYC with Andy Borowitz. Hi, Brian.
Brian: Hi, good morning. First of all, Andy your slightly subversive articles are a service to our nation, so thank you for your service.
Andy: Thank you so much.
Brian: I just wanted to ask you, I'm a big fan of The Onion and if you know from their people on the street interviews, they basically use the same pictures of the same six people over and over again and then just attach new names to them. You, on the other hand, verbally, will use the same names over and over again, particularly, Harland Dorrinson. I was wondering if the people's names that you use are people you actually knew, or names you made up, and also, if The Onion was an influence on you or vice versa?
Andy: I love The Onion. I actually think we coexist in the same universe. I started a little bit before they did because I started writing for The Harvard Lampoon back in the '70s which gives you an idea of just how old I am. I think they started in the '80s. Fake news or satirical news goes back long before either of us, but I've known a lot of the guys like Scott Dikkers who's one of the founders of The Onion, is a good friend of mine. I'm just in awe of some of those stuff.
I try not to read The Onion because I don't want to be influenced by anything they do. Sometimes I will check to make sure they haven't done a headline that I'm about to do because that can sometimes happen. There's limited number of news stories out there that we're all trying to make fun of so unfortunately, sometimes between Colbert, and Trevor Noah, and The Onion, and me, we sometimes land on the same stuff which is always too bad.
The reason why I use the same names is because I found names that aren't real people, and I don't want people suing me. It's like I went to the trouble to invent names of people who don't exist. Harland Dorrinson is just such a clunky neutral sounding name that I can make him anything, like, "Harland Dorrinson, a leading insurrection said," or, "Harland Dorrinson--" I just love how it's so neutral. I will say one thing which is one of my favorite names that I've used over and over again, is Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota.
He's my one expert I throw to again and again and again and some super fan out there and not of me but of Davis Logsdon, this fictional character. Actually went out and created a LinkedIn page and they went nuts. They really tried to make him a real person. Unfortunately, the picture he chose for the LinkedIn page really was of a real person. It was of this guy who was, I think an academic in Queensland, Australia or is that New Zealand? Now I'm showing my ignorance, but somewhere down there. I felt bad for the guy because he was being unfairly linked to me for eternity which he didn't give me consent to, so that was regrettable.
Brian: Harland Dorrinson. If we see Harland showing up as a popular baby name, we know that your influence will live forever but you're talking about these three stages, ridicule, acceptance, and celebration of ignorance among our leaders. It turns out that it may not just be an American phenomenon because Maria is calling in who wants to say that this is also happening in another country which I will let her identify. Hi Maria, you're on WNYC.
Maria: Hi there, I'm from Brazil and I've been enjoying the segment very much. It kept me wondering when it became a matter of identity and pride to not know anything, to pick the candidate that is the stupidest of all? Of course, you may remember that we have a president in Brazil that's called the Trump of the Tropics. Not very proper comparison because he is steeped into military dictatorship tradition but he takes pride on being stupid and ignorant. I wonder when this transition happened here and I'm going to take the answer off the air because the dogs are very loud. Thank you.
Brian: Thank you very much. Well, the book is about the 50-year curve of it happening here. Andy, I'm not going to ask you to go through all that again, but does the name Bolsonaro come up in your book or is there going to have to be a Brazilian Borowitz to write that one?
Andy: I think you need a Brazilian Borowitz to do that, although I guess if there's a Brazilian version of this book, maybe I can do a Bolsonaro chapter. I'm very familiar with him and his antics. I do think that there's a trend throughout the world and I think it has a lot to do with, in my book, I talk about the advent of TV, and then the internet, and social media. People who are very inflammatory and say dumb things that are catchy like a Donald Trump or a Bolsonaro, they thrive in that environment.
They wouldn't have done as well before all this technology happened. I think that that is why it's been happening more recently, but it's true we've always had dumb politicians. We've had them in this country. We've had them around the world, but the last 50 years, with the advent of this mass media, that has really put a lot of rocket fuel under the trend towards ignorance. I apologize for any role that the United States had in inventing TV because it certainly has played a role around the world.
Brian: All right, we're almost out of time. We've gone through your three stages of public ignorance in the United States. We've done ridicule, acceptance, and finally, we arrive at celebration of ignorance in our political leaders. Does that celebration, if we spell that, does it start with a T?
Andy: It's where we are now. We're in celebration. In the celebration phase, we've gone from dumb politicians pretending to be smart, dumb politicians being proud of being dumb, to now smart politicians are pretending to be dumb. By that, I mean really well-educated guys like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, are saying flagrantly ignorant things. They're saying, "Take this horse medicine for your coronavirus," stuff like that. They're saying, "These votes shouldn't be certified," when they know they should be. This is the most ridiculous and also the most heinous stage of ignorance we've had yet.
There are some people now who I think should be given credit for being genuinely ignorant. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a smart person pretending to be ignorant. She really comes at it quite naturally. I do want to give her some credit though because she's the one who invented the concept of Jewish space lasers. I don't know if you're familiar with that Brian but apparently, you and I both possess space lasers, which I was so excited by because Jews have had a rough time through history. We could have used lasers when we were being run around by the Gestapo, or I guess as she calls it the Gazpacho. I was very flattered.
Brian: You know they handed out a space laser to me and everyone else who was bar mitzvahed in the year that I turned 13. I hope they did that at your synagogue.
Andy: No. I grew up in Cleveland. We were a little bit behind the curve. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert they have the natural goods. They're not faking anything, but it is really the hallmark of celebration is that now guys who really know better are acting like ignorami.
Brian: I thought you were going to talk about Trump that's why I said does celebration start with the letter T, but there is a robust debate over whether Trump is dumb or if he's an evil genius because he's so politically smart at manipulating people. Do you fall into one camp or another? Then we're going to be out of time.
Andy: You have to read the book and you know I have say that, but Donald Trump is deeply ignorant. He doesn't know that Frederick Douglass is dead. He doesn't know the difference between the Baltics and the Balkans. You could go through the list, he is deeply, deeply ignorant.
What he does have is something known as an island of competence and that's a psychiatric term that was developed at Harvard University. He is very, very good and very talented when it comes to getting people's attention. That served him in New York when he was tabloid fodder, served him as the host of The Apprentice and it's gotten him where he is today. It's complicated. He's not smart, he's deeply ignorant, but he has one very, very powerful superpower. That's my take on him.
Brian: Andy Borowitz's new book is called Profiles in Ignorance, and he will be doing a live Profiles in Ignorance show this Thursday night at Symphony Space on the upper west side. You can buy an in-person ticket or a live-streaming ticket. They also have a reduced price in-person ticket for people under 30, that's Thursday night at Symphony Space. Andy, always a pleasure. Thank you very, very much.
Andy Borowitz: Thanks, Brian.
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