Radley Balko observes that Fox’s failure to promote Mike Judge’s Idiocracy was rooted not in the knee-jerk corporate censorship that everyone (including Tino) suspected, but in the fact that the movie sucks.

The basic premise of the movie is that stupid people outbreed smart people, and so in 500 years the world is on the brink of starvation because the idiots are watering their crops with Gatorade. Our hero is a 2006 soldier of perfectly average intelligence who has wound up in the future as a result of an experiment gone wrong. He is now the smartest person in the world.

Balko is right: the movie is dumb, possibly because Judge takes a strange view of stupid people. The future elite aren’t a collection of insistent bureaucrats who just don’t know their asses from holes in the ground — something we’ve certainly got a present-day model for — but rather a bunch of hillbillies. The future White House:

Now, that’s funny, but it’s hard to go anywhere with it. The future stupid people don’t know that they’re stupid, but then they don’t think that they’re particularly smart, too. That’s a lot of comedy being left on the table, right there.

Other would-be jokes are kind of baffling. In the movie, one of the few things that actually appears to function is an enormous Costco, miles on a side. It’s so large that it’s got its own mass-transit system inside it.

I don’t get the joke. Costco sells things at bargain prices in an atmosphere that manages to be bare-bones and at the same time not nearly as horrible as a Wal-Mart. (Wal-Mart entrances, where they keep the shopping carts, have the strange property of always smelling like someone took a dump in there.) To make effective use of Costco, you have to be able to plan ahead; in general, people who shop at Costco are smarter and wealthier than the average person. Maybe that’s why Costco is one of the few semi-functional things in our grim moron future; it’s not very clear.

There are some good gags: in the future, nearly every business has turned into a thinly-veiled front for prostitution, because the idiots are only interested in sex:

That’s funny, but it’s not enough to build a movie around.

And it’s interesting, because Idiocracy seems like a real departure from everything else Mike Judge has done. Hank Hill, the plodding, ordinary guy who didn’t go to college, always triumphs over the pencil-necked geeks.

In Office Space, Lawrence, the next-door redneck played by Diedrich Bader, is shown in the end to have the answers (and the useless Milton winds up rich). Even Beavis and Butthead usually came out ahead. In the Judge universe, the cardinal sin is condescension, and it is always punished.

In Idiocracy, there’s nobody who even considers themselves superior to our hero, average Joe. This not only throws Judge off his game, but it confounds the suspension of disbelief as stupid people never know, or accept, that they’re stupid.

The word ‘lead’ is an odd one. It can be the chemical element with the atomic number 82; it can be something you use to keep your dog from running off; it can be — particularly outside North America — an electrical wire; it can be a key piece of information in a police case, or it can be the first paragraph or so of a news story. And those are just the nouns that I can think of right now.

In the newspaper business, two of these uses intersect in a way that might cause trouble. These days, all large-circulation newspapers (as well as nearly everything else) are printed using a process called offset lithography, which involves using oily ink and wet plates; the ink adheres to the dry parts of the plates and is then transferred to a rubber roller (that’s the ‘offset’ part) which is then pressed against the paper to make an impression.

In an earlier day, newspapers were printed using actual type, which was made of alloys containing a high proportion of lead (the metal). This historic use of lead in printing lives on today in such terms as ‘leading’ for the space between lines of type.

Anyway, so the newspaper people found themselves referring to two distinct things by the same word; they’re pronounced differently, but then newspapers are a written medium, so it was a problem anyway. And so they came up with the weird spelling ‘lede’ for the beginning of a story. I don’t know the history of that, but I’m sure McCormick was involved somehow.

This habitual use of the word ‘lede’, combined with the fact that minor American newspapers don’t seem to really even be trying anymore, results in things like this, from today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

And that’s a terrible ‘lede’ to the story, too, one that would get a ‘B’ at best in a college journalism class.

One might say that the Post, or at least its copy-editing department, has been Lee’d, but while the new ownership doesn’t seem to be an improvement the truth is that the thing was already a basket case when it was owned by Pulitzer.