Willy Staley’s profile of Mike Judge in the New York Times is full of gems like this:
Calling “Idiocracy” a documentary is one of those jokes about Donald Trump that was made constantly in the latter months of 2016 and now reeks of a certain strain of ineffectual liberal smugness. Still, it’s an observation not entirely without merit. As recently as two years ago, the movie felt like a relic of the jingoistic Bush years, but then history shuddered in such a way as to render it clairvoyant.
In “Idiocracy,” the secretary of state is sponsored by Carl’s Jr., a company whose chairman very nearly became our current secretary of labor. In 2505, the Oval Office is occupied by an ex-wrestler and porn star named Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho; our president has been on the business end of a Stone Cold Stunner and once appeared in a nonpornographic segment of an otherwise soft-core Playboy VHS tape, dumping sparkling wine onto a limousine. His name is a brand name, too.
I hope one day to learn there’s a German word for “proposing something deliberately absurd which later turns out to be entirely factual.” They’ve got all the best ones, like joy derived from the suffering of others, and “grief bacon.” This would just complete the trifecta.
Of course, this profile largely exists to promote Judge’s new work, not his old. Turns out Silion Valley rhymes with Idiocracy more than I had thought:
If “Idiocracy” imagined that America would one day amuse itself into ruin, then “Silicon Valley” offers a compelling case for how we’ll go about doing it — not in spite of our best and brightest, but because of them.
Do the Germans have a word for “Mike Judge kinda needs a hug?”