I just watched the movie Idiocracy. Two very average people get frozen for 500 years, and when they wake up they’re the smartest people left on Earth.
I have two complaints.
First, the movie opens with a shot of Earth as seen from space. This just happens to be exactly (exactly) the same image I use as my desktop background, so the first 20 seconds of the movie made me wonder why the video wasn’t playing. This may be unimportant to the larger audience.
Second, it was meant to be a comedy – and it had some funny jokes – but I’m pretty sure its premise is exactly right. The film opens with a narrative about how the intelligent couples of the world are all busy having intelligent discussions about when to have children, while hillbilly Cletus who doesn’t understand birth control has a dozen children with three different women and his family tree flourishes.
With the natural forces of evolution no longer able to remove any but the most catastrophically stupid from the gene pool, it really is a question of who’s reproducing most. The evidence is all around us.
Comedian Greg Giraldo does a great bit about letters that civil war soldiers – 17 year old kids – wrote home from the battlefield. He recites an example:
My dearest Hannah,
This morn finds me wracked with the fiery pangs of your absence. I’ll bear your cherished memory with me as I battle the forces of tyranny and oppression.
Then he speculates what letters from Gulf War soldiers must sound like:
Dear Marie,
It is hot as $%^ out here! … It is very, very hot, and I am very, very sweety (sic). It is very, very hot out here because I am in the dessert (sic). What else did I wanna axe you? Oh yeah! Don’t $%^& nobody ’til I get back!
(And now let’s pause for a moment to reflect that “‘very very hot’ Civil War soldier” was just an awful choice of search string ot use when trying to find that quote. Now Google thinks I’m gay, with a Civil War fetish.)
The movie gets no more than two stars for being funny, but five for obliterating all remaining hope for the future of humanity.
The fallacy in your post is that you chose a particularly eloquent civil war passage to compare with a crass (or made up) contemporary quote.
Older language always sounds more refined, civilized, pleasing than everyday language. Shakespeare versus Dickens versus Steinbeck versus TXTing. A hundred years from now “Dear Marie” will sound poetic compared to:
Hey M-toy,
It is #*&@ here. BTW $&@)* and *^$#@ yesterday. And *(^*% *#^% Iraqi #%^^$^. Finally #^%$$&^ &%$$&&^ &$#^&%#$ #%&^%.
It’s also fair only to contrast authors with other authors. That Shakespeare wrote poetry doesn’t itself suggest that every baker and fisherman in 1600 conversed with their families in iambic pentameter. The fun of comparing letters from soldiers is that they should be (statistically) at the same level of education, or the same “class” of society. There’s no particular reason for a soldier today to be less educated than a soldier of 1864, besides that society is overall.