The Marching Morons
EUGENICS – A twentieth-century ideology as dangerous and influential as fascism itself – persists in our discourse to this day, though many imagine we left it behind with the Holocaust or the Tuskegee Experiment. The Covid-19 Pandemic has demonstrated how eugenics continues to structure capitalist discourse on public health, and though disabled comrades have been pointing this out since February 2020, the national media’s unthinking acceptance of ableist and eugenicist talking points has not significantly changed across two and a half years, two different presidential administrations, and well over a million deaths. Last winter, for example, the Omicron spike inspired official public reassurance that only those who were unvaccinated or have preexisting conditions would suffer severe illness. Given the abandonment of lockdowns, unemployment compensation, and protections against eviction, this amounted to a eugenic public health policy that flatly justified the deaths of the disabled and underprivileged by minimizing the value of their lives while reassuring “normal” citizens that the people who matter (able-bodied white-collar workers and capitalists) would be safe.
Yet this is not merely a matter of problematic rhetoric. From the beginning, responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in the US not only have relied on ableist talking points and policies but even have edged into eugenic political strategy, as when the Trump administration apparently accepted the demographic advantage of allowing casualties in heavily Democratic coastal cities, where the plague spread most rapidly in its early months, and thus brushed off initial concerns over Covid. A year later, with the Republican base baking up an anti-vaccination culture war, the Biden administration seemed to have taken the same gambit when it encouraged vaccinated people to stop wearing masks and backed in-person teaching in the 2021-22 school year. [1] Eugenicist rhetoric has even infiltrated colloquial speech in performatively cruel references to Covid as the “Boomer Remover” or knee-slapping descriptions of vaccination as an “IQ test.”
Ableist language comes naturally in mainstream culture, and while such jokes should make us uncomfortable, I too have indulged occasional fantasies of our nation’s stubbornly ignorant gerontocracy being decimated by this plague. Of course, it’s one thing for radicals to feel this way about our feckless political rulers, the exploiting classes of bourgeois tyrants, or cops who have finally found a way to make their job more dangerous than factory work. It’s quite another thing when liberals declare that they are withdrawing their empathy from typically marginalized demographics such as the politically abandoned rural working class, disabled city-dwellers, or even children under the age of five.
This almost reflexively casual style of eugenicist thought is neither exclusive to any specific political ideology nor particularly new. Obviously the original eugenics movement emerged with Social Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century, but the most recent pop culture artifact to promote this perspective came a hundred years later in Mike Judge’s Hollywood flop-cum-cult-touchstone Idiocracy (2006). Originally produced as a parody of George-W-Bush-era Fox News rhetoric and extrapolating from the same corporate social trends that Judge had excoriated in Office Space (1999), the film reemerged in public discourse during Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, a decade after the movie’s release. Director Mike Judge, co-writer Etan Cohen, and ordinary fans all commented on how the film’s predictions had proven true (Berry; Stein; Lange; Friedman).
Liberal Dysgenic Mythology
BASED ON the premise that less intelligent (and implicitly poorer) people typically have more children and produce them more quickly, Idiocracy imagines a future of useless fools and dupes who would make an average Army volunteer of our own era seem a nerdy genius in comparison. The “idiots” of Idiocracy gratify their immediate urges and are unable to even maintain basic social and agricultural infrastructure. In a century that strives so consistently to kill irony through the ever intensifying absurdities of late capitalism, this scenario shifted over a decade and a half from being perceived as hyperbolic satire in the late Bush years to being hailed as sadly all-too-realistic during the Trump administration. In particular, the reduction of political debate to pro-wrestling-style entertainment, the reliance of media personalities and ordinary people alike on prefabricated catch phrases in lieu of ideas or arguments, and society’s refusal to deal with obvious problems that challenge the conventional wisdom of consumer capitalism – all seem reasonably prescient, at least by the standards of a Hollywood movie. Yet none of these ideas were surprising to the film’s original audience. Rather, like so many aspects of Trumpism, the film merely enacted an exaggerated and charismatic variant of the tendencies that had already guided political and advertising strategy for a half-century.
Many highly educated (but perhaps childless) liberals took the bait and filtered their rediscovery of Idiocracy through their loathing of Trumpist populism. Contained in the movie’s title itself and self-evident to the liberal professionals most consistently flattered by the DNC, the film portrays a nightmare of the American political system falling prey to a rabble of morons willing to elect an incompetent showman of a leader. The liberal commentariat’s concerns about “the adults in the room” or critique of citizens “voting against their interests” consistently infantilized both constituents and their representatives. Combined with an overly conciliatory attitude toward wealthy white men (especially ignorant eccentrics), such a confluence of prejudices encouraged the media to judge Trump’s presidency on an extreme curve, to underestimate the seriousness of his administration’s threats to democracy (insofar as it exists in the US), and to annoyingly fetishize white working class voters while mischaracterizing the petit-bourgeois constituency that forms the “intellectual” and power leadership of all fascist movements.
In Idiocracy, an insulting neoliberal caricature of the working class exonerates a political and economic order that offers ordinary people nothing more than slogans and junk food. Disturbingly, some liberals appear to have adopted Idiocracy as a text analogous to what The Camp of the Saints (1973) represents for white nationalists (Novak; Trumbore; Johnson). The fear of an electorate overrun by excessively fertile ignoramuses is in some ways barely distinguishable from the far-right theory of the Great Replacement. Both myths imagine dystopian futures that must be resisted lest the privileged subjects’ notion of Civilization be diluted and destroyed by a barbarian rabble.
The Boots of CM Kornbluth
IN THE manner that science fiction tropes are recycled through the decades (whether consciously or unconsciously) Mike Judge’s vision of a dysgenic dystopia was foreshadowed by a well-loved story from the Golden Age of science fiction – “The Marching Morons” by Cyril M Kornbluth. HG Wells had explored the idea that people might gradually degenerate into idiocy as early as 1895 in The Time Machine, but Kornbluth’s story could not help but be complicated by his own personal experience. A New Yorker of Polish-Jewish descent, combat veteran, and lifelong SF fan, CM Kornbluth wrote about his “morons” in what we might describe as the final overt phase of the classical eugenics movement. Kornbluth published the story in 1951, six years after manning a heavy machinegun in the Battle of the Bulge and earning a Bronze Star (Pohl).
As in our current Covid rhetoric, often someone’s identity, political outlook, and prejudices merely shape the type of biopolitical framework they conceive. Like Etan Cohen, Judge’s Israeli-American co-writer, Kornbluth’s dysgenic satire in some ways conscientiously reverses the Nazis’ obsession with the supposed physical perfection of an Aryan übermensch in favor of an emphasis on the mental competence of average people. While “The Marching Morons,” like a number of Golden Age classics, can easily be read as the story of an alienated nerd culture (or even as a juvenile revenge fantasy), like Idiocracy, it does not so much valorize extraordinary intelligence as it laments foolishness and congratulates the common man. Yet, these two texts approach this theme in different ways due to the nuances of their plots and the implicit politics of their authors.
In “The Marching Morons,” a man preserved by a botched experimental anesthetic procedure awakes in the future to be enlisted in the solution of its main Problem – sometimes referred to as “Poprob” in the story’s telegraphic newspeak. Found and revived by a lone potter digging clay from the ruins of our current civilization, the revived twentieth-century man is quickly passed upward through a network of agents and experts. In return for money and power, he devises a genocidal solution to the Population Problem, enticing the titular “morons” to book passage to a new colony on Venus – only to be launched into space to their doom like so many lemmings. Kornbluth’s story has a long tradition of being interpreted according to the needs of its readers, and his sea-lion-toned satire is so gentle that his intent is highly debatable (Campbell). Nevertheless, even if genocide solves the story’s Problem, it is hard to believe that Kornbluth was genuinely promoting eugenic praxis.
Kornbluth not only belonged to an ethnic group considered subhuman by the most bloodthirsty eugenic movement of his time, he was a literal anti-fascist combat soldier and had been a member of the leftist Futurian group since his teenage years in New York City. Kornbluth collaborated on projects with Judith Merril and Frederik Pohl for the majority of his short career; both described themselves as Marxists at various points, and the novels that Kornbluth wrote with them include the anti-militarist future fantasy Gunner Cade (1952) and the corporate colonial marketing send-up The Space Merchants (1953). These classic texts suggest that “The Marching Morons” should be read as a narrative without heroes or even as an anti-authoritarian parable, but it is not exactly easy to pin down the political viewpoints of eccentric nerds in the early years of the Cold War.
The Futurians were neither doctrinaire nor uniform in their political perspectives, but one strain of their output demonstrates a typical Golden Age fascination with social control – both as a dystopian premise and as a potential guiding force of enlightened governance. Accordingly, “The Marching Morons” not only satirizes something we might call a “degenerate” culture but also points out how efforts to control or correct such a problem would be Quixotic at best and nightmarish at worse. Certainly the story demonstrates a familiar cluster of issues; overpopulation, advertising, and social bifurcation were perennial concerns in Kornbluth’s work of the early 1950s. By late 1953 his sociopolitical speculations described an anarcho-capitalist North America of organized crime cartels in The Syndic – a once-panned effort later hailed by libertarians (notorious for misreading even the slightest literary complexity). Thus there is a long tradition of interpreting Kornbluth’s work in whatever ways seem flattering to the reader’s politics. I suspect this has forever flattened the message of deceptively simple works that actually present rather thoughtful satirical sketches of American culture. We must look for the elements that set Kornbluth’s stories apart from the genre discourse if we are to get some sense of what he was trying to say.
Class Politics
AMERICAN SF of the early Cold War was highly individualistic. This ideological tendency within the culture presents a particularly interesting problem for writers interested in depicting broad sociopolitical issues and movements. Several of Kornbluth’s fictions are interesting particularly for the way that they do not show how problems are solved by individuals but rather how political intrigue operates through coalitions. “The Marching Morons” actually mocks the notion that an individual will heroically solve problems only to reveal the actual solutions to have been proposed, negotiated, and achieved by a whole social stratum over an extended period of time.
Oddly enough, Kornbluth presents a distinct form of class consciousness in his story, and notably the same cannot be said of Judge and Cohen so many decades later. Indeed, Idiocracy has been rightfully criticized for avoiding racism merely to indulge all the more shamelessly in a multi-racial form of classism – and perhaps this, more than anything else, appeals to twenty-first century liberal cultural elitists (Novak). However, as with so many Hollywood products, this derogatory portrait of the future presumes something of a cultural vacuum. On the other hand, “The Marching Morons” not only imagines cultural context beyond the top-down forces of advertising, it even posits a certain class politics – though it is neither strictly proletarian nor unproblematic. As vicious as its implications might be (whether taken satirically or seriously), the story evokes identification with the genteel and beleaguered professional managerial class. [2] In this way, Kornbluth’s story is perhaps more relevant to post-2016 liberal political discourse than even a twenty-first-century text like Idiocracy. Indeed, unlike Judge and Cohen, Kornbluth does not imagine a society in which everyone is a fool but rather a society in which a class of privileged buffoons have overwhelmed their more competent managers through sheer numbers.
Cleverly, Kornbluth presents this as an inversion of a classic dystopian trope – whereas his time traveler at first presumes the majority of society are “oppressed slaves,” he is told, “The actual truth is that the millions of workers live in luxury on the sweat of the handful of aristocrats” (383-384). With this terminology, Kornbluth emphasizes how the stealth managerial class is a hereditary caste defined by their intelligence and disdain for the rabble they ostensibly provide for; yet the PMC of his story also embody the best of supposed aristocratic values in their sense of duty to those they consider beneath themselves. As uncomfortable as this conceit may be, the story’s introductory section emphatically demonstrates that the masses of this world have neither intelligence nor skills nor taste nor even basic politeness. This is meant to prove their inferiority, but to a Marxist cultural critic, it might actually demonstrate Kornbluth’s own striving bourgeois prejudices. The grandson of immigrants and a precocious nerd, he clearly wanted to prove himself in the world of science fiction literature and absorbed culturally bound assumptions ranging from basic notions of good and bad taste to more specific ideas of how writers should behave (such as notoriously forcing himself to drink black coffee).
Kornbluth aimed to become a tastemaker in Science Fiction, and he died from a freak heart attack at age 34 on his way to interview for the job as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Rich 337). However, as a peddler of both top-shelf critical SF and rattled-off pulp fiction in a time when such distinctions often meant splitting hairs, he likely identified with the potter Efim Hawkins, hawking his wares to rich boors who wander into his shop. Thus, from its very first pages, “The Marching Morons” not only critiques postwar consumer culture but also mocks consumers themselves, and this is not so different from The Space Merchants, which similarly depicts a corporate managerial class manipulating and brainwashing ordinary citizens, or Idiocracy, which imagines a population too stupid to even drink water thanks to a devastatingly effective advertising campaign.
Whereas Mike Judge’s classism openly mocks proletarian consumers, though, Kornbluth’s intentional moments of ambiguity are comparatively nuanced. Inverting our dystopian assumptions, “The Marching Morons” initially shows how advertising and deceptive engineering keep the masses safe – by styling passenger airplanes as “rockets” or by intentionally miscalibrating speedometers on cars. The story justifies this by demonstrating the material consequences of a dumbed-down society; in a scene where our time-traveling protagonist is taken to meet with the managers, Kornbluth treats us to a series of news reports, transcribed in comically dumbed-down American slang, that illustrate the near-constant rate of deadly catastrophes in this stupidest of all worlds (379-381).
Building on mid-century American obsessions with speed, streamlining, television, and movies, Kornbluth satirizes the culture industry’s vapid opportunities for gratification, but he implicitly blames consumers themselves for their petty desires. Judge presents a similar commentary in Idiocracy, where consumer tastes include sexual and caloric indulgence exaggerating turn-of-the-century American culture. However, in “The Marching Morons,” Kornbluth’s managerial class attempts to mitigate the damage where it can, and in The Space Merchants, Kornbluth and Pohl engage substantially with the exploitative industrial and finance economy that makes such a world profitable for the elite. While corporations are happy to destroy crops with a sports drink in Idiocracy or to lace people’s food with addictive substances in The Space Merchants, the PMC of “The Marching Morons” have come to envision themselves as proverbial sheep dogs who always have “someone on hand” to make sure cars drive slowly, buildings don’t fall down, and movies emphasize how awful children are.
The inclusion of anti-reproductive propaganda among the safety measures taken by the PMC in Kornbluth’s story introduces eugenics as a subtle, even comical apparatus. Kornbluth notably separates his story from the dystopian eugenic tradition established by Huxley’s Brave New World in two ways that are preserved in Idiocracy: The world of “The Marching Morons” is a relatively free one – a capitalist democracy recognizable to any American in 1951 or 2021 – and yet it is not presented as a meritocracy. A dystopian version of the story would involve authoritarian control of the “morons,” while a utopian variant would allow a meritocracy to rise above and ethically control the idiot masses. However, Kornbluth never claims his PMC elite to actually be able to control their society. They only barely maintain a grip on their world through persuasion and subterfuge. (A half-century later, Judge dispensed with the managers entirely.) The executives and architects of this world are buffoons that their secretaries and engineers tirelessly try to prevent from causing catastrophe. Significantly, because the “morons” of Kornbluth’s story are free, they elect foolish and incompetent leaders, and thus the PMC must attempt to control governments and economies via what we might call “the deep state” today.
Everyman & Antihero
IN SOME ways, this is SF about the after-effects of automation. Kornbluth’s precursor story – “The Little Black Bag,” another classic of the era – had originally presented the premise of professional atrophy purely in terms of technological advancement: A world that could engineer an all-but magical doctor’s kit would no longer need doctors to be particularly knowledgeable. In “The Marching Morons,” he pondered the genetic causes of such intellectual degeneration as well as the artists, nurses, and scientists who would mitigate that Problem. He describes this managerial class as an “aristocracy” possessing superior taste, intelligence, and breeding – sandwiched between a reckless bourgeoisie and a zombified proletariat.
Again, this worldview indulges the 1950s SF readership of disaffected nerds and weirdoes, but its ambiguity has also enabled many to read it as a satire of fan culture (Campbell). The vision may have even genuinely appealed to Kornbluth himself, and yet we must not take it as serious endorsement. The PMC of Kornbluth’s world hardly come off as virtuous. True, they have the requisite sense of responsibility to care for their society, but they have always approached the “morons” as a Problem that needs to be solved. This is presented in explicitly National Socialist terms, shifting seamlessly between appeals for improved social services and racist xenophobia, at once excoriating civilization for “tolerat[ing] economic and social conditions which penalized childbearing by the prudent and foresighted” and lamenting “the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers…shiftlessly and shortsightedly having children” (384). The first part of this critique would seem to promote universal welfare programs, but it implies these benefits should ideally apply to a privileged caste – one presumably defined in genetic terms. The slide into rhetoric that not long ago might have been used against Kornbluth’s own immigrant family illustrates how hegemony collapses notions of class, caste, intelligence, and social value. Kornbluth likely intended to lure his upwardly-mobile fans with such seductive and commonplace utterances as a second-generation petit-bourgeois immigrant might hear and would know only barely masked something sinister. The Problem echoes Nazi rhetoric about “the Jewish Question,” and after alluding to several past attempts to solve it, Kornbluth steers his narrative toward a Final Solution with a Swiftian grimness that is stripped bare by the vulgarity of his antihero.
As in Idiocracy, the arrival of a man from the world of the writer’s era provides a “solution,” but whereas Mike Judge enlists a likeable everyman as his protagonist, Kornbluth gives us John Barlow – a greedy real estate operator accidentally preserved in suspended animation through a freak accident during a dental procedure (374-375). Barlow may be more intelligent than the “morons,” but he is only slightly less boorish; Kornbluth portrays him as a bigoted, Machiavellian grifter and budding megalomaniac as he eagerly embraces the opportunity to become world dictator in exchange for planning a genocide.
Whereas the world of Idiocracy only needs a man with common sense to save it, “The Marching Morons” demands something more sinister, challenging the very ethics the caretakers of this society claim to have. A lack of a certain type of imagination holds them back from their Final Solution, and a craven huckster from the mid-twentieth century has the necessarily sociopathic perspective to solve it. As the caretakers explain to Barlow near the end of the story, the shameless brutality of such a plan would have been impossible without him. “We couldn’t have swung it ourselves; our minds just don’t work that way. All that stuff you knew from Hitler—it wouldn’t have occurred to us” (394). With these words, World Dictator Barlow is sealed into a rocket and launched into space along with the millions he sent there himself.
“The Marching Morons” is less a lesson in eugenics than a critique of twentieth-century utilitarian ethics and instrumental reason; in this way it is of a piece with The Space Merchants, published a year later and also involving the premises of overpopulation, a grotesque consumer culture, and a ruthless marketing campaign to colonize Venus. Certainly “The Marching Morons” includes more than a few cringey moments, but this is part of its design, and it fits with the dark, hardboiled worldview of the best SF writers of that era, who brought cynicism from the Second World War and the pulp crime genre to their satire. While some fans of the story may have taken its message as a serious invocation to have children, this hardly appears to have been its intent.
Trumpist Readings
WHEN RECENT discourse on Idiocracy focuses on its characters, critics inevitably comment on how President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (a professional wrestler turned politician, played by Terry Crews) reminds them of Donald Trump. Yet, the film portrays Camacho as a lovable buffoon, ignorant of public policy but still a bit smarter than the average citizen and, unlike Trump, at least curious enough to listen to “the smart guy” (Joe Bauers, played by Luke Wilson). Here we see the liberal tendency to focus on aesthetics, expertise, and social type over material conditions and class solidarity. Where Idiocracy does emphasize material conditions, it focuses its attention on consumption rather than production, and in a turn typical of neoliberal Hollywood, we see less of how people earn money than how they spend it. The worldbuilding obsesses over lattés, hamburgers, and handjobs, imagining a fast-food or vending-machine version of any desire up to and including sex. Yet these instant consumer luxuries are self-accusatory; they are our own desires, and they should make the film uncomfortable in the same way that President Trump’s consumption habits embarrassingly remind our nation of its pathetic gluttony.
On the other hand, it is hard to read “The Marching Morons” without seeing time traveler John Barlow as the spitting image of Donald Trump. In this, we see the tin pot dictator’s real appeal. The worst kind of petit-bourgeois everyman – the kind who might very well become rich in our society – would jump at the chance at unlimited power, and he would do anything to get it, up to and including genocide. His capacity to do such things has nothing to do with his genetic background but rather results from our society’s perverse incentives, and any supposed values grafted over these are mere window dressing for an avarice that a man like Barlow can neither understand nor control. In Kornbluth’s speculative future – a world where the strong must take care of the weak – such an attitude might be unthinkable, but our world – where the clever praise themselves for their ability to swindle – has no such limits. John Barlow shows us that America not only makes men like Donald Trump – but that there must be millions of others like him, and that they have the potential to go much further than Trump ever did. It also tells us that, while the slaughter of innocents is, indeed, murder, we would still be justified in yeeting such petty tyrants into outer space.
Killer Dweebs Blown Behind Us
A LOT of good genre writing necessarily interrogates the parameters and assumptions of the genre itself. In Kornbluth, we see the futurist’s simplified vision of a complex society satirized down to a basic problem of people. Given: everything else can be solved by technology. Given: the smarter folk will be even better, more ethical people than we see today. The problem is merely that some people are in the way. Only a genocide separates our Protagonists of History from a promised Utopia. This is not only the mythology of eugenic progressivism in the first half of the twentieth century, more conservative writers had squared this circle by portraying men of action who could bring order to chaos, just as the western writers had done for generations before. Had Kornbluth merely absorbed and recapitulated the sad train of logic from concerns of the Bourgeoisie becoming “soft” to the fascist conclusion of might making right through blood and iron? Or was he mocking this premise and calling out SF fandom’s latent authoritarian impulses?
By importing a definitively twentieth-century type to impose a horrifically twentieth-century Final Solution, CM Kornbluth was both critiquing his era and allowing for the exhonerative genre maneuver of “one last job.” Whether in copaganda or in utopian worldbuilding fantasies, this idea – whether in the form of a noir criminal, a retired detective, or some neutralizable Killmonger as Raskolnikov and Czolgoz dreamed of being – establishes the parameters of both our world and our imagination. Writers, readers, and radicals alike look for a character who knows what must be done and can shape the world to his will through brute force. This is not merely a matter of imagining the ability to easily use and discard such charismatic monster-heroes – it prompts the question of why we feel compelled to imagine such men in the first place.
Yet, that was Kornbluth’s world. The Second World War was one last job – or tried to be, as the Great War had – a final act of brutal but necessary violence in a time of crisis. As someone who himself had killed to presumably bring about a better world, Kornbluth must have seen this problem as a part not only of his culture (SF) but of his society (US) and even of himself. And what had the Second World War created? Not a peaceful utopia but rather the global terrain for the next war. By 1950, the fledgling United Nations was fighting a “police action” in Korea that looked very much like the last two wars for peace.
I’m not sure CM Kornbluth even knew what exactly he was saying in “The Marching Morons,” but he must have known murder on a civilizational scale as an integral part to that very thing we call our civilization. He also knew the promise that one last act of violence could wash itself away as a reflexive justification for an endless series of horrors. Rather than presenting a prescription for social revolution or genetic evolution toward a better world, his stories mock the human weaknesses we see all around us and gaze back at the hurricane of wreckage in our past. We see human behavior as a more or less chaotic whipping around in the storm of this world, and Kornbluth only hoped to show us some notes on its physics.
Endnotes
As I write this in April 2022, the temptation to declare Covid “over” is now playing out for the third time, and while we all hope we’ll get lucky this time around, it’s hard not to anticipate another wave of hospitalizations and deaths whenever the next variant emerges. Note in May 2022: I am now revising this manuscript while my family and I are recovering from mild Covid. Note in July 2022: Another wave of a new variant now sweeps the US with shockingly little mainstream media coverage and barely any public health measures taken.
While I hope to sidestep the ongoing and fraught discourse on how exactly to define the PMC, whether it constitutes a separate class or is merely a subset of the proletariat under bureaucratized labor conditions, and whether it is fundamentally counter-revolutionary or could form effective leadership cadres for radical organizing, I must insist on using this term. It clearly describes the nerds and technocrats of Kornbluth’s story, and if it makes political analysis of “The Marching Morons” uncomfortable, this suitably fits the story’s ambiguous critique of American civilization’s class hierarchy.
Works Cited
Berry, David. “The Idiacurracy of Idiocracy: When Life Immitates Art for Better or for the actual Worst.” National Post, 8 Mar. 2016.
Campbell, James. “Fear of a Stupid Planet: Sexuality, SF, and Kornbluth’s ‘The Marching Morons.’” Extrapolation, vol. 55, no. 1, 2014. doi:10.3828/extr.2014.5
Friedman, Megan. “Director Mike Judge Says It’s ‘Scary’ How Idiocracy Has Come True.” Esquire, 20 Aug. 2016. www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/news/a47841/mike-judge-idiocracy-2016/
Idiocracy. Directed by Mike Judge, written by Mike Judge and Etan Cohen, performances by Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, and Terry Crews. Fox, 2006.
Johnson, Adam. “Idiocracy’s Curdled Politics: The beloved dystopian comedy is really a celebration of eugenics.” Salon (republished from AlterNet), 5 Mar. 2016. www.salon.com/2016/03/05/idiocracys_curdled_politics_the_beloved_dystopian_comedy_is_really_a_celebration_of_eugenics_partner/
Kornbluth, CM. His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of CM Kornbluth, edited by Timothy P Szczesuil, introduction by Frederick Pohl, NESFA, 1997.
Kornbluth, CM. “The Little Black Bag,” His Share of Glory, pp. 458-478.
Kornbluth, CM. “The Marching Morons,” His Share of Glory, pp. 372-395.
Kornbluth, CM. The Syndic. Doubleday, 1953.
Kornbluth, CM, and Judith Merril (as Cyril Judd). Gunner Cade. Simon & Schuster, 1952.
Kornbluth, CM, and Frederick Pohl. The Space Merchants (originally serialized in Galaxy as Gravy Planet). Ballantine, 1953.
Lange, Ariane. “Idiocracy Writer Says Donald Trump Made the Movie a Reality Faster Than He Ever Imagined.” BuzzFeed, 3 June 2016. www.buzzfeednews.com/article/arianelange/donald-trump-idiocracy-coming-true-screenwriter-says
Novak, Matt. “Idiocracy is a Cruel Movie and You Should Be Ashamed for Liking It.” Gizmodo, 29 June 2014. gizmodo.com/idiocracy-is-a-cruel-movie-and-you-should-be-ashamed-fo-1553344189
Pohl, Frederick. “Cyril,” His Share of Glory, pp. xiii-xvi.
Stein, Joel. “We Have Become an Idiocracy.” Time, 12 May 2016. time.com/4327424/idiocracy/
Trumbore, Dave. “Is Donald Trump the Herald of Idiocracy?” Collider, 1 Sept. 2016. collider.com/donald-trump-idiocracy
Frank Fucile is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire.