The Great Dumbing Down

 

On December 19, 2041, late night talk show host “Blabb” McNaughten, in his opening monologue, commented that "anybody who is dumb enough to believe anything the President ever says should go to the kitchen – right now – and take out the heaviest cast iron skillet you have, and immediately wang yourself in the head with that skillet.”

 

What followed was a class action lawsuit, initiated by a Mrs. Leonard Falco, of Sandusky, Ohio, for the over 28,000 viewers, who, apparently, were not only dumb enough to believe anything the President had to say, but who were also dumb enough to go into their kitchens and hit themselves in the head with cast iron skillets.  Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured, though several skillets were seriously damaged.

 

Lawyers for Mrs. Falco argued that it was “unreasonable for the average person to comprehend sarcasm, irony, or even that somebody was ‘only joking’ and had not intended to be taken seriously,” regardless of the format of the original message.  And they won, requiring Blabb to buy each person listed in the suit a bottle of Tylenol and replace all damaged skillets.

 

It did not stop there.  In Upshand V. Rainsford Public Library in the following year, citing precedent in the Falco case, it was ruled that it was not enough that a book was placed in the fiction section of the library, or even that it was clearly labeled fiction on the spine.  The library had a “moral responsibility” to ensure that readers realized what they were reading was not true.

 

Full disclosure waivers were temporarily used, but in the spring of 2045, in Packwin V. The City of Crossgrove, it was ruled that any kind of waiver was not acceptable since it required an understanding of what was being waived.  As Judge Alfonso Grey commented “Hell, if they’re too dumb to realize a book about unicorns ain’t true, fat lot of good signing a waiver’s gonna do.”

 

The National Board of Librarians, in an effort to deflect litigation, themselves sued the Authors’ Guild, claiming that the true fault lay in those people who created fiction to begin with.  In the spring of 2046, in a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Librarians.  In further court cases, in particular Cordwood V. The National Enquirer and Billings V. Everybody Possible, it was established that intentionally writing anything that was not true, even if it were clearly marked as such, was a “malicious breech of civil trust,” and, depending on the mitigating circumstances, could even be seen as “a criminal trespass.”  It was further ruled that it was unlawful to “write, publish, or otherwise disseminate” anything that anybody simply might not be able to understand.  Which was just about everything, including the ruling itself.

 

Before the full of effect of this ruling was realized, however, it was all overturned.  Blabb McNaughten, in an interview with the only remaining news station, Weasel News, in the summer of 2046, when asked for his opinion on everything that had happened as a result of his original statement, commented, “They’re all a bunch of morons.”  In the subsequent lawsuit, Blabb was found not guilty when it was determined that, indeed, anybody who would ever suggest such legislation, much less pass it, had to be a moron.

 

Unfortunately, nothing much changed as a result of the ruling.  Commented Mr. McNaughten, “What do you expect?  After all, they’re a bunch of morons.”

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