The Dumbering of America

Coming to you live from the lounge of the USC Annenberg School of Communication. A bank of monitors cover the wall, providing us with a live feed from each of the major news outlets. The one closest to us is broadcasting CNN Headline News.

Good Gawd. CNN Headline News is hands down the most inane block of programming we've ever seen. Currently, they are debating whether Tom Hanks or Tori Spelling have enough life experience to be believable if they are cast in the real life Eliot Spitzer movie. ("Tom played a gay guy once" was among the endorsements given by one of the panelists)

Now they’ve moved on, and are showing a clip from the latest edition of those awful movie parodies, (you know, the ones that have supplanted the Wayans brothers as the unfunniest comedy franchise in Hollywood.) The clip includes a scene where they parody the Tom Cruise Scientology video.

As we go to a break, the tomato behind the anchor desk intones, with her eyebrows properly raised in the universally understood symbol for anchor seriousness: “Coming up next, we’ll take a look at the hilarious new must-see movie that attacks Tom Cruise."

To paraphrase David Spade, we can actually hear ourselves becoming dumber.