Just Kill Me Now

We're all familiar with the nutballs who think that 9-11 was an inside job. And their brethren who are convinced that the moon landings were filmed on a sound stage outside of Hoboken.

At the same time those of us who can both read and dress ourselves are periodically shocked to learn that most college graduates don't know who George Marshall was, have trouble with the chronologic order in which to put the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War I, and don't know who won the Wars of the Roses (Henry Tudor, you dolt).

The great humorist Jean Shepard explained that these were the two broad classes into which ignorance and idiocy divide themselves: aggressive and passive. The first, he explained, is the guy down at the end of the bar holding forth -- at great length and high volume -- that there's a guy who invented a carburetor that makes a car get 50 miles per gallon, and run on water. [Ed. - STFU, and ask your father what a carburetor was.] That's the actively ignorant fellow. But next to him, lapping it up, is some guy who stares, slack-jawed, and believes every word. The passively idiotic. He'd like to invest, too.

By their very nature these two species live in their own comfortable eco-system. They cannot survive apart.

But the two are very separate groups. One cannot be both actively ignorant (proclaiming the objectively ridiculous as fact), while simultaneously being passively idiotic (by soaking it all up).

What, then, is one to do with this article in The Daily Mail, reporting that one-in-four of Her Majesty's subjects don't believe Winston Churchill was real. It's not that they've never heard of him, mind you, it's that they know who he is supposed to have been, but they don't believe it.

We are speechless.

We tip our hat to our Manhattan Correspondent, who ought really to be paying more attention to business. Particularly in this market.