https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/of-course-we-should-primary-hakeem-jeffries

https://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/nicole-kidman-lace-dress-versace-pieter-mulier-practical-magic-2

RIP Tim

Twenty years later, Mike Judge’s prescient comedy is getting harder to laugh at.

Corporations twist public institutions into thinly veiled cash cows. Unprecedented drought and food insecurity loom. A civil servant who tries to use science to save millions of lives is threatened with death. News and entertainment, religion and profanity, politics and violence, eating and excreting have all collapsed into a singularity of the human condition.

I can’t tell whether I’m remembering the plot of Idiocracy or this is all part of real life in 2026, twenty years after the movie’s release.

Most iconic films that define a generation—its hopes, fears, and fashion—do so by crystallizing a moment in time. It’s a rare trick requiring uncommon insight. Think The Graduate, The Breakfast Club, Slacker. Watching any one of them now is like opening a window on the past. Imagine what it takes to write and direct such a movie, like 2006’s Idiocracy, that captures a moment two decades in the future with startling accuracy.

Mike Judge may be better known as the force behind the lowbrow brilliance of Beavis and Butt-Head, the scathing corporate satire of Office Space and Silicon Valley, and the heartfelt, DFW-coded King of the Hill. But Idiocracy is the Austin-based filmmaker’s most prescient work of all.

In the movie, Luke Wilson gives a sweet and genuine performance as a literal average Joe frozen by the Army in an experiment. Through a series of mishaps, he and Rita (Maya Rudolph), a prostitute escaping jail by agreeing to be a guinea pig in the same test to keep people in suspended animation, are left forgotten in their pods longer than planned.

In the intervening five hundred years, the American populace gets objectively dumber through genetic drift, as intelligent professionals delay starting families and people who are, well, idiots go on to have babies by the dozen. Civilization devolves into chaos as commercial profits overtake the public interest, and the public’s interest is occupied by the pursuit of money, sex, and base entertainment. Corporations corrupt everything from health care to government—just ask Joe’s clueless internist, Dr. Lexus, or President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

When Joe and Rita awake, they are the smartest people on the planet. Unfortunately, that planet is dying. It’s dusty, it’s crumbling, and all of the crops are failing because a corporation has marketed its electrolyte beverage as the perfect irrigation fluid. “Brawndo,” crows every other flyer on America’s grimy streets, “It’s got what plants crave!”

Idiocracy has received criticism for perceived eugenics themes and misogynistic tropes, but if you’ve seen the Beavis and Butt-Head episode“The History of Women” or Silicon Valley’s “Bad Money,” you probably already know that such backlash doesn’t fluster Judge. And just as many praise Idiocracy as satire that pokes fun at the bigoted and cruel, not their targets, and skewers turn-of-the-millennium corporate insensitivity, social disintegration, and government gridlock writ large.

What reportedly did needle Judge and cowriter Etan Cohen to the point of despair was Twentieth Century Fox’s nonexistent marketing and limited distribution for the film’s 2006 debut, allegedly due to poor test screenings and fear of brand reprisals. Despite that, the 2007 DVD release made Idiocracy a sleeper hit.

As a Gen Xer, I couldn’t get enough of the shock humor, cynical take on institutionalized greed, and Rudolph’s sympathetic portrayal of a savvy woman who used others’ underestimation to her advantage. It was like an unvarnished American Monty Python, with pitch-black, absurd, crass, biting hilarity, and I loved it. Now? Well, given our recent history, it’s getting harder to laugh.

Parallels between today’s information fire hose and what used to be a hyperbolic comedy are painfully numerous. Comments under news articles and in online forums have been common for years—“Idiocracy is a documentary” and “Mike Judge is Nostradamus.”

If you haven’t seen the movie, there’s no time like the present. Texan viewers take note: It’s set in Washington, D.C., but as you’ll see from the oak-scrub setting, it certainly wasn’t filmed there. Look for Austin’s old Seaholm Power Plant, San Marcos’s Gary Job Corps Center, and, of course, Pflugerville’s stretch of Interstate 35 in the background.

Locations aren’t the only thing you’ll recognize watching Idiocracy in 2026. There are countless prophetic moments that bear striking resemblances to our contemporary culture. Spotting them at an anniversary/funerary viewing party is both fun and disturbing.

Caution, spoilers ahead.

In the movie, H&R Block is a brothel, and the secretary of state is “brought to you by Carl’s Jr.” It’s an example of what Judge imagined might happen as social contracts degrade and corporations insinuate themselves into places they don’t belong, turning public services into profit-making enterprises and degeneracy. In our real-life timeline, mainstream brands are enthusiastically collaborating with OnlyFans stars, tech is falling over itself to bankroll Trump’s controversial state ballroom, and public-safety services are brought to you by Geico.

When Joe tries to make a call, the pay phone chirps in homage to its corporate megaconglomerate, “Welcome to AOL Time Warner Taco Bell U.S. Government long distance!” Is Unilever Slimfast Vaseline Hellmann’s TRESemmé any different?

In 2505, a desperate woman pounds on a vending kiosk that has stolen her money without giving her the food she needs for her children. “Carl’s Jr. frowns on vandalism,” appears on the machine’s screen before police show up. Corporations may get some blowback now, but they are beginning to wrestle with how to participate in the quelling of protests.

Record drought and the undermining of scientific infrastructure have caused agricultural failure in a second Dust Bowl depicted in the film. Meanwhile, just last month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the heat in July of 2026 surpassed the record set during the first Dust Bowl.

The White House’s dead lawn is strewn with debris in the movie. Sure, it’s due to drought and a decrepit above-ground swimming pool instead of UFC fight crowd trampling and demolition waste, but in Judge’s twenty-sixth century, the First Lady’s East Wing office is still intact.

Camacho, played to unhinged perfection by Terry Crews, whips the crowd from the floor of the People’s House. Just like another American president, he is mugging and gyrating as lights and music grind and a fog machine blankets the stage. Both commanders in chief say “bullshit” from the presidential podium and have a closer association with adult films than decorum would normally allow.

Huge banners of Camacho’s signature grimace and peculiar hairdo hang from every vertical surface, just like at today’s Department of Justice, Department of Labor, and, soon, Federal Aviation Administration.

With the gladiator arenas, Stars and Stripes bodysuits, and the president’s five Ultimate Smackdown championships in Idiocracy, it’s hard to tell where government ends and wrestling begins. But was President Camacho also a WWE Hall of Famer who hosted a UFC match at the White House? Did he hire the Smackdown mogul’s wife to be the secretary of education? If so, Judge must have left those scenes on the cutting room floor.

In a literal sign of widespread incompetence, the lettering on the side of St. God’s Memorial Hospital is a typographical nightmare. In Idiocracy, though, there aren’t any competent graphic designers left to decry the spacing and font weight, like real ones did over alterations to signage at the Kennedy Center.

In the world Judge imagined, every available millimeter of every surface is covered with branding. Ads adorn people’s clothes and encircle TV shows as they play, in an assault on the senses as bad as modern gas-pump videos. As our real-life AI mows down marketing design, labeling is becoming even more hideous than the movie conceived.

One of Idiocracy’s most regrettably pedestrian parallels is that the R-word has come roaring back as an everyday, if malignant, insult. And if you don’t think flipping the bird is baseline communication now too, you haven’t been on any dating apps lately.

And then there’s the shirtless, overtanned, overbuilt Fox News anchor who looks uncannily like Joe Rogan.

With Brawndo in every drinking fountain, the scourge of superfluous electrolytes is inescapable. A single, monolithic rehydration company may not employ one half of the population today, but the electrolyte industry is a $40 billion business in the U.S. alone.

When Joe guides the switch from irrigating crops with Brawndo to water, the company’s stock crashes, and automated layoffs like the ones we are already seeing tank the economy. The resultant rioters may be at the gates of the White House instead of the Capitol, but comparisons to January 6 are obvious.

Before people understand that Joe’s scientific approach has worked, he is pilloried by government officials, and the crowd is screaming for blood. This is the fate of many scientists of our time, but perhaps none more so than Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose guidance through the emergence of both HIV and COVID-19 got him a congressional investigation and menacing death threats.

When Joe gets a futuristic ID, it’s a barcode tattooed on his arm, which is slightly less invasive than your employer embedding a radio-frequency chip in your hand. Everything is monitored by cameras (Flock, anyone?), corporations can turn off your car, and justice is swift whether it’s just or not.

In pursuit of Joe at any cost, black-clad law enforcement officers fire into a car on a crowded street. Though the most widely reported story is the death of Minneapolis mom Renée Good, it’s genuinely disturbing that there is more than one news item echoing that shocking scene.

So how did Judge-stradamus do it? How did he predict the dehumanizing nihilism of corporate avarice and the degradation of social norms so emblematic of the Donald J. Trump presidency, when both cheerers and jeerers marvel that he seemed to come out of nowhere, a falling star or an earth-destroying asteroid, depending on your point of view?

Judge was not available for an interview, according to his publicist. But when asked in 2016 about his apparent powers of prediction, the filmmaker acknowledged some similarities even then, saying, “I’m no prophet. I was off by 490 years.”

I don’t believe the genius it took to write Idiocracy has anything to do with foreseeing Trump in particular; the film doesn’t even paint a particularly faithful portrait of the man. President Camacho empathizes with the hungry instead of obsessively pondering the word “groceries,” after all. When the chips are down, Camacho listens to scientists instead of musing about injecting bleach or calling a climate catastrophe a hoax, and he eschews tacking up extravagant gold decorations in favor of tasteful sage drapes.

It might be more precise to say that both the movie and the president are merely natural consequences of the human nature Judge is so famous for astutely observing. His work never fails to shine a light on our depths. He knows our instinctive love for depravity, our capacity for boredom and laziness in the service of comfort, and just how stupid things can get before we’ve had enough.

I don’t think we’re any dumber these days than we were before; many of our predecessors were as shortsighted as we are, living for now, amassing and consuming as much as possible, and pausing only for a slack-jawed huh-huh at the nearest bloodthirsty infotainment. We’re just not hiding it anymore. I also don’t believe Judge could laugh at our nature without loving it, at least a little.

Though Idiocracy has a lot to say about today, what it says about tomorrow remains to be seen, and I take heart that its predictions aren’t totally pessimistic. By the end, our average friends, Joe and Rita, end up where they should be, as the kindest, smartest people on Earth—happily married and leading a society that’s imperfect but fed, and, of course, well hydrated.

If Judge’s judgment is as keen as it seems, though, we’d best keep a watchful eye on Carl’s Jr.’s future plans.

*excerpt from Heather Martin's article*

Full Article here:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/culture/mike-judge-idiocracy-turns-20/

She had changed then once right after their relationship became public to "we always find our way back"