The Bell Curve

"I can’t begin to tell you the dismay and the shock and probably panic that exists in the White House and in the salons of the elites of the Democratic Party over this. They didn’t even consider this a possibility. This never entered their mind. This was going to be the end – not just of me, folks, the end of talk radio."

--Rush Limbaugh

Every once in a while, I get in a funk. A reliable precipitating event is reading the New Yorker cartoon contest, where they give you a blank cartoon and you have to supply the caption. They show you the three editor's picks for the cartoon from which the winning caption will be selected. Every single one is so much better, so much more clever and intelligent and inspired than anything I can come up with. That is a sort of intelligence I simply do not have.

And this deficiency only scratches the surface of my mental dullness. Music, oh, there is a vast ocean of intelligence I simply am slack jawed before. Or any form of math from multiplication tables to calculus, count me out. (Geometry, for some unfathomable reason, came very easily. Go figure.)

So I exist on a sliver of the one narrow band of intelligence I can use and earn a living with, and I'm like one of those narrowly adapted frogs: If they ever change my pond, just a few degrees of temperature, or lower the water level an inch, or introduce a new predator, I'm toast.

The one thing that keeps me going is knowing there are some people eking out a living out there in the world who are even more mentally inept than I.

Take Rush Limbaugh, and those who listen to him.

Just look at the moronic bombast which he repackages every day--the salons of the effete elites, the repetition of the same phrase as six cliches which say the same thing, "They are terrified. They are scared silly. They are shaking in their boots," etc. As if regurgitating up another phrase saying exactly what the previous five have said is somehow effective and entertaining.

But there you have it--just when you think you are the bottom of the barrel you discover, you are actually higher up than someone else.

Likely in the big middle.