"Todd's Wide World of 'What If? II'"

"Recent studies show that Americans are no more smarterer than previous generations."

Lancaster (Durrrhhh:Roy'drs) - Recent studies conducted by Government Scientists have found that since the founding of the United States of American in... whatever the hell the date was, Americans have actually become consistantly stupider than the generations immediately preceding them. "Think of it like the opposite of an Atomic Bomb blast;" a scientist explains, "where there is an ever-expanding concentric ring of damage originating from a single point of impact." Upon noticing that I was just holding the tape recorder close to his mouth, and drooling on myself while staring at his shiny pocket-protector, the scientist slapped me. "I'm sorry, but I need your full attention for this theory... you alright?" After I wiped the drool from my chin and nodded, the smart-guy continued, "At the rate of intellectual degradation of the American public, people will at one point forget to breathe and drop dead; in other words, death on a massive scale."

And then I crapped my pants. Of course, the scientist didn't realize it at first, but once he did... he ran back into his office. I was unable to get him to get out from under his desk to finish the interview.

My head cleared the nearer I drew to the newspaper's bullpen, and a thought came across my mind as I typed this article,"Could it be that it isn't our fault, the ones with standard IQ's that we're losing our intelligence? Could it be that the smart people are making us all dumber?" To test my theory, I asked Tommy, the chunky Intern to go ask Dr. Davidson, the paper's resident Mathematics and Physics genius and scientific consultant to explain the "Theory of Relativity" to him while I watched from across the room with my Binoculars. Tommy didn't see the point, but being a dutiful Intern, he complied.

What I saw shocked me: Tommy crapped his pants within five minutes and then passed out on the floor. Dr. Davidson hunched over Tommy, checking his pulse... Tommy was dead. Apparently, Dr. Davidson's impressive wealth of knowledge shut Tommy's mind off and stopped his heart. I dashed back to my desk and sent out a company-wide e-mail warning all the other co-workers of what was going on (excluding all the really smart ones, of course) and asked them to meet me on the roof of the building to discuss what we should do at 9 PM. E-mails rapidly hit my account, expressing concern, but said they would be there... some even offered to bring drinks.

At 9 PM, we discussed our options. Many said that we should just go to another State and ride it out, until I mentioned to them that if we went to a State with a lower IQ than us, we would probably be the ones who killed other people. They agreed, a road trip was out of the question... even if we loved Florida, it was too dangerous. So we then talked about how we could identify the smart people so that we could save lives, and Bob from Accounting mentioned a Flier that could have really hard questions on it that we could hand out on the street, and people would have to give us their personal info (home address, etc.) in order to participate. He said the questions could be randomly generated by a computer program so as to avoid hurting any who wrote or filled out the Flier... a silent weapon.

It was such a brilliant idea that Bob, upon realizing how smart it was, threw himself off the roof in order to avoid hurting the rest of us... the first martyr for the cause.

Marlene from the Circulation Desk said that we could print the Fliers at night with the printing presses that the paper used, and Don from the Printing Division agreed to set the plan in motion. So now we had a plan, but we had a bigger problem... this would be an Underground movement, and we needed a zippy title. Among the names that people came up with, (I especially liked "The Crimson Dumb", but I'm too fair-skinned to wear Red) "The Dumb Uprising" was the one that everone liked the most... we avoided using the word "Militia" since the dudes that us that word are too dumb even for us.

Take heart gentle people, "The Dumb Uprising" is here to save us all... we'll be sending in reports from the front-lines of "The War on Smartness" to this Blog from time to time to keep you updated.

Viva La Estupidistas!!!