IN THE BEGINNING, JUST AS THE Neaderthals (accidentally) managed to delay their complete extinction, when the brainier CroMagnons overran latePleistocene Europe, by living in caves52 that were well beyond the beaten path, so too the prehistoric Morons were partially shielded from the predatory designs of their intellectual superiors simply because of the remote, diminutive and generally worthless nature of the land in which they had been "providentially chosen" to dwell. Throughout what little we do know about their earliest period (8500-750 B.C.) there were the occasional times when an attempt was made by one rampaging horde of barbarians53 or another to rape, pillage and/or conquer the Morons. All of these efforts failed. Because of their bizarre gynecological configuration the raping of Moronic women proved to be a task daunting even the horniest Vandal, Hun, Mongol or Tatar. Not only did such an act take at least 45 minutes to consummate it required an empathetic relationship with one's "victim" that defeated the potential rapist's purpose. As for pillaging; it didn't take the average plunderer long to realize there was nothing in Moronia worth stealing. And those who dreamed of enslaving the Morons learned almost as quickly they produced more headaches by the sweat of their lowly brows than they did any useful work. Not until Trajan decided in 117 A.D. that, technically, the Roman Empire wouldn't be complete unless the Morons were included in it was Moronia occupied for any significant length of time. In one way or another the Romans remained until 1453. The last flicker of Rome's imperial glory was in fact extinguished not when the Turks entered Constantinople but when the fleeing Constantine XI was cornered by an angry mob of Morons and stoned to death in what is now Moronville's town square.54
During the 1300 years of their Latin Period precious little of Rome's civilizing influence rubbed off on the Morons; who were quite content to pass all that time sitting on their haunches, munching raw turnips and engaging in thumbtwiddling contests.55 The only physical evidence of their presence the Romans left behind was a small cluster of residential and civic structures which eventually became Moronville. Finding themselves exiled to this (intellectually) farthestflung of their imperial corners—and after failing miserably to fraternize with the Morons—the Romans withdrew behind the walls of what they called their Domus Romanicus (home away from Rome), and the Morons spitefully referred to as DumbUsville. Judging from the archeological evidence these Italians marooned on the shores of Moronia's Mainstream managed to enjoy a mental lifestyle that was almost as stimulating (and decadent) as any they might have led on the banks of the Tiber.56 The sudden cultural and geopolitical vacuum resulting in Moronia from the downdraft of the fallen Roman/Byzantine empires was immediately filled by the Morons' nearest (but far from dearest) neighbors, the Cretins. Situated in the rugged mountains rising steeply from the northeast corner of the Moronic plain,57 Cretiny has always enjoyed a natural strategic advantage over the Morons—one they generally chose58 not to exploit unless the Morons themselves became intolerably bellicose as the result of an occasional turnipfamine; or their chronic proclivity for making a nuisance59 of themselves.
At this particular juncture in its history, however, Cretiny was also menaced by a grave political crisis. After the House of Ambrose had recently regained the Cretin throne from the House of Cards60 its newlycrowned king, Harold II—aptly nicknamed "The Worrier"—was fretting over what he was sure were the plans of his younger brother, Moritz, to return from his Florentine exile61 and overthrow him. To preempt any coupist moves Moritz might make Harold got the bright idea of annexing Moronia and installing Moritz as its puppet "Protector." By so doing, Harold reasoned, he would be killing 2 birds with 1 stone. First, his scheming brother would be kept so busy governing the ungovernable Morons he wouldn't have the time or energy for plotting a palace putsch. Second, even if an antiHarold plot was hatched he could keep an eagle eye trained on Moritz's Moronville machinations from his castle in Cretin City.62 At the time Moritz received his Moronic marching orders he was living in the Jewish ghetto of Florence among a commune of artists, musicians and intellectuals known as the Utopians.63 While Moritz received the news of his appointment badly (he described being sent to Moronia as nothing less than "a sociointellectual death sentence") to his Utopianist friends this act of fraternal treachery was a god send. "What better place," they argued, "could there be than Moronia for putting our theories about turning some small corner of the world into a paradise on earth to the acid test of reality?"
So it was that when Moritz entered Moronville he was accompanied by a "royal retinue" comprised of what Lorenzo de Medici later lamented would have been the "Jewish icing" on the cake of his Italian magnificence64 [In keeping with their secular orientation and antiZionist views these Florentine Jews actually styled themselves as "Hebrews"—a fact explaining how they came, quite mistakenly, to be called "Highbrows" by the Morons.] After converting the ancient center of Dumb Usville (which, for sentimental and symbolic reasons they renamed the "Ghetto") into a "citadel of humanistic learning" and a "bridgehead" from which they could launch their "allout attack against the evils of ignorance" the Highbrows65 declared Moronia's independence from Cretiny and crowned Moritz as "Ambrose I"—the first King of the Morons.66 The ensuing hostilities (described by the Morons as a "Revolution" and by the Cretins as "a petulant act of juvenile delinquency"67) ended with the famous Battle of Knucklehead Ridge;68 a Mexican standoff both sides used as a convenient pretext for splitting their jurisdictional differences down the middle and negotiating a peace treaty by which their "2 sovereign micro states hereby unite themselves to form an unbreakable—and unbeatable!—alliance against the hostile world in which they have always been forced to struggle for their dignity and ethnic survival."
In the relatively tranquil aftermath of Moronia's successful separation from Cretiny, Ambrose I issued a series of royal decrees, edicts and proclamations outlining his radical program for "The Cultural Utopianization of Moronia." This early example69 of a "revolution from the top down" couldn't have been more modern in its legislative approach to solving social problems. A system of universal compulsory education was established for every Moron under the age of 15. The weekly Moronville "pilgrimage" of all turnipfarming families to attend a variety of statesponsored art exhibits, concerts, plays and lectures was also made mandatory.70 And for those aboriginal Morons fortunate enough to live and work in Moronville the Ghetto's royal theater, concert hall, opera house and art gallery were open every evening and all day on the weekends for their free (and obligatory) "enjoyment & edification." Other measures employed by the Utopians in their campaign to eradicate ignorance included posters, banners and handbills extolling the "blissful benefits" of music, art and literature.71 When these "softsell" methods proved to be ineffective, harsher measures were adopted to "help" the Morons swallow the cultural medicine prescribed for them by Ambrose I and his clique of Highbrowed dogooders. On the first and third Sunday of every month Morons convicted of "cultural recalcitrance" were punished publicly in the town square.72 By our standards the penalties inflicted on these scofflaws were anything but cruel or particularly inhuman. To the Morons, however, having one's ears boxed, knuckles rapped or nose tweaked in public was a matter of no small social consequence.73 And, in extreme cases, some Morons were made to suffer the "ultimate humiliation" of being forced to stand on an inverted turnip bushel in a fullyfrontalized state of starkhatlessness—while a crowd of hecklers ridiculed the size and shape of their unadorned pates.74
But even the specter of this most fearful of all punishments failed to break the Morons' spirit of resistance against the idea of being utopianized. So it was that, in 1628, after banging their own heads against the brickwall of the Moronic mind set for nearly 200 years the Highbrows admitted their noble cause had in fact been hopelessly lost from its illconceived outset. If they had learned anything it was that: "All men are not equally endowed by their maker with the brains needed to appreciate the divine nature of being human." After all was said and done,75 however, it was the Morons who had the last word when they celebrated their victory by adding this new axiom76 to their homespun philosophy of everyday life: "You can lead a Moron to the very fountainhead of wisdom; but making him drink from it is a horse of another color." As a result of this humiliating defeat the Highbrows retreated into the sociointellectual shell of their Ghetto, swearing that "never again would they try to make a silk purse from such a sow's ear."77 And, true to their word, they remained cloistered in what became the exclusively Highbrowed section of Moronville's civic center for more than 2 centuries; creating "a utopian enclave for nobody's benefit but their own." Ironically these cabalistic efforts at "autoutopianization" were eventually so successful the Moronville Ghetto acquired a reputation via the Yiddish grapevines of Poland, Germany and Russia for being an Übershtettle—a supercitystate with pretensions for becoming the (unofficial) cultural capital of Europe. By the early 17thcentury it was generally considered more prestigious to send one's recently barmitzvahed son to Moronia for his advanced education than to Heidelberg, St. Petersburg, Warsaw—or even Cambridge and Oxford! Indeed a convincing case can be made the intellectual history of Western Civilization from 1688-1933 was written almost exclusively by the Highbrow alumni of Moronville's academies of music, art, literature, science, philosophy and metaphysics. [A striking item in this regard: Every one of the violin and piano virtuosi who came to dominate the concert halls of Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, Moscow and London during that period were all either "Ghetto trained" themselves—or the students of teachers who had gained their maestrohood in, of all places, Moronia.] Similarly, the revolutions in physics, mathematics, astronomy, theater, poetry, opera, painting, sculpture and novelwriting that swept their seminal way across Europe in the 19th- and early 20thcenturies were all launched by men who, in one way or another, could claim the University of Moronia78 as their alma mater. Thus it is that the census records from that period contain such nonMoronic (and now illustrious) family names as Marx, Einstein, Freud, Sternheim, Mendelssohn, Horowitz, Heine, Proust, Menuhin, Disraeli, Mahler, Goldberg and Wittgenstein—
Book Two Chapter 3 Part 1 Return to Index
Footnotes
52 Miraculously, as late as 1937 a Neanderthal family was discovered still hiding in a cave near (of all places) Bayreuth. Unfortunately these proto Aryans were an embarrassment to the Nazi's übermenschtheorie (not to mention the promoters of Bayreuth's annual Wagnerfest) and were promptly carted off to the nearest Euthanasia Facility where they perished without leaving a single trace of what would have been their scientific celebrity behind. Rumors about other Neanderthal sightings in Europe are, of course, as common as those pertaining to UFOs and the Loch Ness monster. The most recent scientific dogma on this question (see The Browridge Factor by Prof. Siegfried Horn) holds that any "survival" of this primitive sub species would be more in the realm of behavioral psychology than that of a genuine anthropological find. Nevertheless Prof. Horn provides some data the Morons in particular find interesting on "the correlation between the height of a modern man's brow and the level of his intelligence."
53 Regardless of how "barbaric" these invaders might have been, compared to the abysmal state of the Morons' intellectual development they were not only militarily invincible but exhibited cultural traits considered futuristic by Moronic standards.
54 As with most of their memorials, the Morons have chosen to celebrate this most dubious of their national distinctions with an equally dubious "eternal flame" to mark the spot where they helped the Sultan of Turkey plunge Europe into its Dark Age.
55 A form of passive resistance which persists to this day among the more fanatical of Moronia's small but staunchly ethnocentric "Ugly American" movement.
56 See also the fascinating evidence of this Roman "enclave mentality" contained in the diaries I discovered while excavating a corner of DumbUsville demolished to make way for a (miniaturized) Moronic version of Disneyland, and which appear as an appendix to vol. XVI of History of the Morons.
57 The border between Moronia and Cretiny is actually a major geological fault line that also divided Europe into East and West long before the cold war. Hence even though the Cretins and Morons have lived for thousands of years within (literally) a stone's throw of one another they are ethnically distinct—with the Cretins being decidedly more Slavic than German and the Morons being somewhat less Slavic than German.
58 As you can imagine, the answer to the age old question of who is smarter (or dumber)—the Cretins or the Morons?—depends on who you ask. While, after having spent a year or 2 researching into this issue I have failed to arrive at a definitive conclusion, my hunch is the Cretins, as a group, might be just marginally more intelligent than the Morons. On an individual basis, however, the differences between a Moron and a Cretin are, for most practical purposes, indiscernible. Although it should be mentioned female Cretins are readily distinguishable from female Morons by both their lack of sexappeal (by "Hollywood" standards) and the orthodoxy of their gynecological configuration—a combination of paradoxical factors that has proven to be extremely frustrating down through the centuries for those married Moronic men living close to the border with Cretiny (as most of them do).
59 Especially as it applies to the (understandably) adulterous proclivities of some Moronic husbands.
60 Until 1344 the political history of Cretiny consisted largely of the struggle between its 2 most prominent clans, the Ambrosians and the Cards, who, for some 750 years, took turns sitting on the royal throne.
61 In accordance with the conventions of Cretinous primogeniture, the sitting monarch's younger siblings were "sent abroad"—usually to England or France—where they were expected to remain (royally stipended) at a discreet distance from their brother's throne (an arrangement not unlike that of the "golden parachute" practiced in the modern corporate world).
62 It is indeed the case that, with normal 20/20 vision, one can, on a clear day, see pedestrians making their way along Moronville's Main Street from Cretin City. Whether Harold II intended to monitor what his brother was doing inside the Moronic palace optically or was speaking figuratively is unknown—although Cretinous examples of figurative speech are nearly as rare as those attributed to the Morons.
63 An early form of "antiZionism" based on the belief held by some JewishIntellectuals the Diaspora was God's (typically obtuse) way of telling them their Chosen Land wasn't an essentially worthless (yet hotlycontested) piece of desert realestate but rather the entire continent of subtropical Europe (if they played their providential cards smartly)!
64
A statement reflecting his awareness of the future fact that, while
Florence would be remembered as the cradle of Europe's cultural rebirth,
by having allowed its best and brightest Jews to migrate with Ambrose I,
his uncle Giovanni (Pope Leo X) had squandered Italy's chances for cartelizing
the renaissance and reestablishing its claims to a new and longerlasting
imperial fame. This atavistic strategy for resurrecting Rome's ancient glory
was itself reresurrected by Mussolini who sought (covertly) to enlist
JewishIntellectuals into his fascist crusade. It was, in fact, his quest
for the " Holy Grail of Semitic knowhow" that led the Italian dictator into
his fatal alliance with Hitler. Mussolini was hoping to solve the Nazi's
"Jewish problem" by taking as many Semitic
üntermenschen off the Führer's hands as he could
get—especially such jüdisch schwinerei as Albert Einstein,
Max Rinehardt, Sigmund Freud, Stephan Zweig and Fritz Lang—who would
literally become the jewels in Il Duce's New Roman imperial crown! While
the Italians did receive a few shipments of Germany's "racial garbage," most
of the Jewish Intellectuals who arrived in Italy wisely treated their "fascist
deliverance" as only a means by which they could complete their escape from
Europe. In the end, of course, for Mussolini his "humanitarian bargain" with
Hitler turned out to be no happier than that made by Faust with
Mephistopheles.
Nevertheless a few souls who would otherwise have been
added to the millions of holocaust victims did manage to squeeze themselves
through this lifesaving loophole in the Berlin/Rome Axis. Whether this
footnotesized fact was taken into account when Mussolini and Hitler stood
side by side in the docket of Heavenly Justice is a matter upon which we
can only speculate. But I think it's not unreasonable to assume, as with
all the other "extenuating circumstances" surrounding the role played by
the Italian fascists in WWII, the celestial tribunal was not sufficiently
amused by the comedic aspects of the tragedy they conspired with Germany
to stage manage.
This was a point I raised with President Kennedy when
the subject of America's Vietnam policy came up during our "morning after"
breakfast conversation on June 24th. Despite what might be the "loftiness
of our anticommunist motives" in resisting the tide of Vietnamese nationalism
(one whose seeds we ourselves had sown in 1776) America would, in my opinion,
be on the losing side of a war that was no less criminal (certainly in Vietnamese
eyes!) than that waged so "righteously" by the Nazis and Fascists against
the "evils" of bolshevism. And, even in Machiavellian terms, America's
embarkation on a cause as lost as that which undid George III could have
disastrous consequences for JFK's prospects of becoming king John I. The
President was so impressed with my analysis he immediately drafted a memo
to Dean Rusk calling for a "top to bottom review of the our entire southeast
Asia policy" along the strategic lines I was suggesting—which was to
win the cold war by: (a) Cutting our Vietnam losses; (b) Turning the other
geopolitical cheek, and; (c) Putting America's sociocultural house in order
via a bold domestic agenda of New Frontiersmanship patterned on the pioneering
idealism of the Peace Corps.
65 For reasons of literary convenience (and on certain other strictly aesthetic grounds) I have deliberately chosen to employ this Moronic malapropism when dealing with what most historians of Western Civilization describe as "the Florentine/Moronvillian Jewish Utopians."
66 The Utopians were putting a fullcourt 20thcentury propaganda press on what in the mid1500s was considered by most Morons to be a political lie of schoolyard proportions. Scarcely a single page of Moronia's history can be found that doesn't contain at least someone pretending to be the king of the Morons. And this doesn't take into account the fact that every redblooded Moronic turnipfarmer considers himself as the absolute ruler of the acre or 2 he and his ancestors have cultivated since time immemorial. All things considered (including Moronia's microcosmicity) this doesn't necessarily diminish Ambrose I's status as the founding father of Moronia's "Royal House of Ambrosia."
67 Moritz was only 19 when he challenged his older brother's primogeniture.
68 This "historic" battle was in reality a brawl between a handful of inebriated Morons and Cretins in one of the sleazy beer, turnipschnapps & striptease joints straddling the border of Cretiny and Moronia over a Cretinous remark one of its topless Moronic serving sluts claimed had been made "comparing her bra size to that of her Moronic IQ."
69 A direct line can be traced from Ambrose I's scheme for utopianizing Moronia to Lenin's Marxification of Tzarist Russia, Roosevelt's New Deal, Kennedy's New Frontier, Johnson's Great Society and Gorbachev's Perestroika. And, as we are about to learn, while most historians attribute Ambrose I's failed efforts to elevate the cultural IQ of his subjects to "the congenitally flawed nature of their Moronic mentalities" the same excuse can't be made for the failure of America and the Soviet Union to sophisticate the citizens of their megastates. Hence the question arises: Is there something about all governments, no matter how large or small (or bright or dull their constituents) which renders them incapable of engineering that one aspect of human life which matters most—the attainment of true intellectual happiness?
70 Every morning gleeful bands of evangelical Utopians left their Ghetto apartments and roved the countryside spreading the gospel of cultural enlightenment to every Moronic turnipfarmer they could find. In addition to their portable poetry readings, dramatic recitations, operatic performances, concerts al fresco, lectures, seminars and direct doortodoor proselytizing for the cause of erudition the Utopians converted several turnipwagons into a fleet of mobile libraries. Despite their illiteracy every Moron was required by law to borrow at least 1 book per week in order to foster the love of literature they would eventually acquire when they learned to read.
71 The exhortation to "Revel in the Glories of Literature" was, of course, a glaring example of how the Utopianist's themselves fell into the Moronic trap of putting their cultural cart before their propaganda horse by expecting the masses to understand a message they couldn't read. Not that similar mantras advertising "Knowledge for the sake of Knowledge," "Art is a Way of Life," and "the Practical Benefits of Critical Thinking"—which were shouted hourly from the Moorish Minaret overlooking Moronville's Town Square—didn't also fall on ears that were deliberately deafened by the Moron's antiIntellectual mindset. To an historian such as myself, however, these slogans continue to resonate with the most profoundly modern implications. The Utopians' exhortations to the Morons that "Art is a Way of Life" and "I think therefore I art," represent nothing less than the bedrock on which the Klutzian Gospels of "Escalating Mediocrity" and "the Common Sense of Aestheticism" are laid. And, within the private confines of this footnote, can we not ask ourselves whether, when Klutz wrote (in his unpublished Desert Island Epistle) that: "Even the most ordinary men (and women) should script every move they make and word they utter as if they were the heroic characters of a Shakespearean play," he was setting the stage for my own heroism in undertaking to play the role of a contemporary St. Matthew to his latterday Jesus Christ? Even more to the Morons Awake! point is his stunning oratorio, Variations on an Old Utopian Theme, in which Klutz states: "Wake up my fellow Morons! About one thing we can all agree! Life is short and art is long! So, no matter how small the part fate has cast you to play only a fool would sleepwalk his (or her) way through the one and only performance we give of that divine melodrama known as the human comedy!"
72 Not surprisingly, these sadistic spectacles attracted far larger crowds than any of the "cultural" events they were designed to popularize by making examples of those who refused to take their civilization seriously.
73 The scars of such "psychic" torments were the principal cause of suicide in Moronia before Ambrose XXXII (the "Humanitarian") reformed the Moronic penal code in 1848.
74 The origins of this obsessive cranial fixation unique to the Morons are, despite my lifetime of research into the matter, still uncertain. Nevertheless there are a few facts about this bizarre anthropological phenomenon which can be safely stated. The most striking of which is, that from the earliest stick drawings preserved in the mud floors of their Stone Age hovels to the stained glass windows of their Greek Orthodox cathedral in modern Moronville, the Morons always portray the nude human figure wearing a hat of some sort. While the civilized world chose to hide the genitalia of its nudes behind figleaves (sex hats?) for some inscrutable reason the Morons regarded the top of their heads as the most prurient part of the human anatomy. While the easiest explanation for this might seem to be the need to conceal their brainlessness I'm not at all certain the primitive Morons weren't correctly identifying the human mind as a sexual organ—and the one from which all pornography emanates.
75 As we shall see in a moment, the argument about whether the Morons proved or disproved the Utopians' cardinal rule concerning intellectual egalitarianism was far from over.
76 Traditionally the Morons have always memorialized their (few and far between) national triumphs by enshrining them in newlycoined adages and proverbs. The most recent example of this rather Homeric trait occurred when an exasperated Stalin bid good riddance to Moronia by officially granting it neutral status in 1947—a parting of their cold war ways the Morons promptly epigramized as: "Beating a dead mule with a stick doesn't get one's turnipwagon to market any faster than seducing him with a carrot."
77
Not that utopianism was entirely dead. For a few diehards their failure to
make Moronia an earthly paradise wasn't a philosophical debacle but merely
a tactical miscalculation they had made in their attempts to edify the Moronic
masses. Taking a page from the Morons' unwritten book of Grassroots Aphorisms
these neoUtopians expressed themselves in the following downtoearth way:
"If the footsoldiers in our crusade against ignorance can't keep up with
us maybe we should get down from our high horses and march to the
drumbeat of their pedestrian pace." The skeptics found this "simpleminded"
argument unpersuasive. "What have we been doing for 200 years if not casting
the pearls of our wisdom at the swinish feet of these addlebrained ingrates?"
they asked. "What more could we possibly do to alter the status quo of an
entire society so totally opiated on the blissfulness of its ignorance?"
And it was certainly true their most recent efforts at exposing the Morons
to the "finer things in life" hadn't only been met with the usual acts of
passive resistance, vandalism and desecration but the mutilation—and
even slaughter—of those Highbrow poets, librarians, actors and musicians
who ventured into the remotest reaches of Moronia's artistic wasteland.
What the neoUtopians were driving at, of course, was
not to repeat their previous mistakes by offering the Morons yet another
dose of the same medicine they had so stubbornly refused to swallow in the
past. There was more to teaching the Morons about the virtues of civilization
than shoving the Mona Lisa into a turnipfarmer's face, pushing his
nose into Dante's Inferno or filling his ears with Monteverdi. No.
If the masses were ever to swallow the bitter pill of a culture they perceive
as being elitist it would have to be coated with sugar or preceded by a spoonful
of honey. This meant that in sitting down to write a "literary masterpiece"
no author could fail to take the anti Intellectualism of his readers into
account. If composers wanted their operas and symphonies to be applauded
by people who loathed classical music they would have to cloak them in the
trappings of popularity. Nor were painters exempt from the rule that ordinary
people view the art hanging in museums and galleries as a slap in the face
of their Godgiven preference for pictorial
realism.
78 The name officially adopted in 1845 to gather under one "institutional umbrella" a collegiate system that was anything but institutionalized in the haphazard nature of its evolution and intellectual predilections. Moronville University is now commonly (if not always affectionately) known as "Old MU."