During the second half of the Trump years, Andy Borowitz went on a comedy tour called “Make America Not Embarrassing Again.”
If this sounds like a partisan enterprise, it kind of was. In his act, Borowitz, the celebrated name behind the satirical Borowitz Report, riffed on how Sarah Palin’s slipshod candidacy for vice president in 2012 prepared the ground for Donald Trump.
The tour was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, but it left Borowitz with a deeper curiosity about where the trend of anti-intellectualism and ignorance on the part of America’s top leaders came from. It used to be that presidents had to seem well-informed, and for the most part, they were. Now, not so much.
“The frame I came up with was the last 50 years,” Borowitz said in a phone interview Tuesday. The period spans Ronald Reagan’s successful 1966 bid for governor of California and Trump’s win in 2016. The link? Both men were TV hosts who ultimately won the White House.
In the 1960s, political handlers figured out that it’s easier to find someone who’s good at TV and teach them just enough to run for office than it is to prepare a person who’s capable of leadership to look good on TV.
“We really haven’t looked back since,” Borowitz said.
The result of his research is a new book, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. The book came out last month, and Borowitz has taken it on the road to New York and Los Angeles before bringing it back to Hanover, where Borowitz has lived since mid-2020. He’ll take the stage at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts on Tuesday.
If Profiles in Ignorance sounds like a partisan enterprise, it isn’t quite. Borowitz finds ignorance among politicians of every stripe (Bill Clinton cultivating his “Bubba” personality, for instance) and in his own habits of mind. But the bulk of the damage done to the American public by a politician’s ignorance — the Iraq War, needless deaths from HIV and coronavirus — has been done by Republicans, he said. The list of those episodes, from the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra affair to Trump’s comment about the “very fine people on both sides” of a white nationalist rally, is mind-boggling. The book is a litany, or a series of them, with one alarming event following another.
It’s also a bit of a departure for Borowitz, who has written The Borowitz Report since 2001. Yes, there is much to poke fun at in this epic tale of political cluelessness, but the subject of why so many of our recent presidents and other top leaders have been so knowledge-averse is inherently serious.
As a result, writing the book made him more a reporter than a satirist. After the 2016 election, friends told him he had it made, that satire would pour forth. Not so, he said.
“It’s so hard to make fun of someone who’s so clownish and absurd,” Borowitz said of the nation’s 45th president. In writing about Reagan’s approach to AIDS and homelessness and George W. Bush’s approach to terrorism, jokes are there for the picking, but not satire.
“There’s absolutely nothing funny about a lot of this,” Borowitz said. “It turned out to be a very different book from what I set out to write.”
Profiles in Ignorance breaks its 50 years of history into three pieces: Ridicule, when people still mocked ignorant people in politics; Acceptance, when it became normalized; and Celebration, where Trump and his acolytes have brought us.
But a conclusion follows, and it is less grim, and more humble, than the grandiose ignorance that precedes it.
Borowitz grew up and went to public schools in the Cleveland suburbs, then went to Harvard, so education is important to him, so much so that he thought it would solve the problem of ignorance in politics.
“(B)ut there isn’t a ton of evidence that it would result in our electing smarter leaders,” he wrote in his conclusion. “Why? Because our emotional, not-very-rational engagement with politics renders even the best-educated among us capable of voting like dopes. This is true no matter where you sit on the political spectrum.”
The antidotes are humility and community, Borowitz said, and living in Hanover while he was writing the book helped him see that.
Living in Los Angeles (where he and his first wife created The Fresh Prince of Bel Air in the 1990s), and later in New York, politics tended to be abstract and impersonal, he said.
“I think living in Hanover has reformed this view,” he said. Town meetings and smaller-scale government, where people work together to solve problems, offer “our best chance for democracy,” he added. He’s joining the corporate board of the town’s Howe Library later this month, his first foray into town government.
While they moved to Hanover from New York during the pandemic, Borowitz and his wife, Olivia Gentile, had the Upper Valley in the back of their mind. Gentile (pronounced jen-tilly) got her start in journalism at the Rutland Herald, working out of its Springfield, Vt., bureau and covering the Upper Valley.
The journalism instinct has rubbed off on Borowitz, but he can’t not make jokes. Reality requires laughter.
“It’s very depressing,” he said. “But I think one thing that’s really positive for me about being a comedian is that I find telling a joke really cathartic.”
Tuesday’s event at the Hopkins Center will mix the serious and the ridiculous. Borowitz will be in conversation with Charles Wheelan, a Dartmouth lecturer who has written some funny books of his own. And Karyn Parsons, who played Hilary Banks on the original Fresh Prince of Bel Air, will be on hand, mainly to read Borowitz’s selection of the 20 choicest quotes from Dan Quayle, the walking malapropism who served as vice president from 1989 to 1993.
Borowitz said he sees a glimmer of hope that the political winds are shifting away from ignorance and back to knowledge and competence. Voters in Alaska defeated Sarah Palin in an Aug. 31 special election.
“I think that is in part a reflection of Alaskans’ desire not to elect a national joke,” he said, adding that “at least in this one test case, ignorance didn’t win.”
For tickets ($25+) to “An Evening With Andy Borowitz” got to hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422. A book-signing event will follow in the Hood Museum’s atrium.
God’s Country, the debut feature film from Hanover native Julian Higgins, screens at 7 p.m. Friday in the Hopkins Center’s Spaulding Auditorium. Higgins will be on hand to talk about the film after the screening. Tickets are $10.
I’m not going to give out all the details here, because the joy of First Friday is to just go and be pleasantly surprised.
OK, a few details: Two Rivers Printmaking Studio, in the Tip Top Media Arts Building on North Main Street, is hosting “Multiple Avenues: Artists Explore Printmaking,” a faculty show, through October. A reception is planned for 5 to 7 Friday evening.
And Kishka Gallery, on Gates Street, will hold a reception for artist Edie Fake, in collaboration with the Center for Cartoon Studies.
In between those two places, don’t forget to stop at Scavenger and Long River galleries, and at the Main Street Museum, where the player piano will be making music.
FLAME The Band, an Upstate New York ensemble, plays at 4 p.m. Sunday at Lebanon Opera House, a benefit show for Visions for Creative Housing Solutions, a local nonprofit.
The band itself has a story to tell: Its members have developmental and physical disabilities. They have earned an international following for demonstrating that anyone so moved can rock out. Tickets are free, but registration is required through lebanonoperahouse.org or at 603-448-0400. A $5 to $10 donation at the door, by cash or check, for the housing group, would be welcome.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
