Over the weekend Jeb Bush, the US presidential hopeful, told CBS News that if it came to it he would support Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, “because anybody is better than Hillary Clinton”. You can see why he felt obliged to say so, but it won’t be easy for him to defend the idea that Clinton is the worst presidential prospect he can think of.
When it comes to standing by something you’ve said, no matter how stupid, Bush can look to fellow Republicans for guidance. Trump still maintains the patent falsehood that he saw thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in Jersey City, even though he benefits from a form of inarticulacy so comprehensive that he can almost always plausibly deny what he said afterwards.
Ben Carson, meanwhile, stands by his “personal theory” that Egypt’s pyramids are not pharaonic tombs, but giant grain stores built by Joseph of dreamcoat fame. “It’s still my belief, yes,” he told CBS last month.
I don’t even understand why you’d want to believe something like that. It’s not an article of faith, and it’s spectacularly indefensible. The pyramids would be useless as grain stores; they’re not even big inside. And access would be a logistical nightmare. The theory doesn’t just make its adherents look stupid. It makes Joseph look stupid.
Virtual vacuums of the mind
“On some great and glorious day,” the American journalist HL Mencken once wrote, “the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” At the time, in 1920, he was facing the daunting prospect of Warren Harding – “a hollow-headed mediocrity”, Mencken called him – becoming America’s dumbest president. A few months later, Harding won by a landslide.
The quotation regained popularity as a kind of prophesy in the time of George W Bush, but of course Bush wasn’t a downright moron, nor is his brother Jeb, nor even Trump. I’d have included Carson in that list, before the pyramid thing.
Mencken’s real point was that American voters were morons, and would naturally gravitate toward a candidate who could “most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum”. While they might be sensible folk individually, collectively the electorate displayed considerable resistance to complex ideas and uncomfortable truths, and a deep affection for baseless conviction and those who appeared to be, as Mencken put it, “filled to the brim with the flabby, banal, childish notions that challenge no prejudice and lay no burden of examination upon the mind”.
Successful candidates could either be genuinely stupid, like Harding, or merely unprincipled enough, as Mencken thought Harding’s opponent James Cox, to play the part. In more modern terms, one can either stand firm in one’s actual belief that the pyramids are grain stores, or you can just go on television and insist you’re of the honest opinion that Trump would make a better president than Clinton.
My phone’s guiding light
While spending a few days in a remote part of Devon, I am reminded not just how dependent I am on technology, but how strangely varied are its effects on my life. My phone may have more processing power than the best computers two decades ago, and may offer access to an unparalleled store of knowledge, cat videos and Mencken quotes, but none of that means very much when you cannot get a signal.
After stomping around on a rainy hillside in the dark for half an hour in an unsuccessful bid to make a connection, I realised the one truly life-changing benefit of the smartphone: wherever I go nowadays, I always have a torch with me.
