“Welcome to Costco… I love you”

That and “Welcome to AOL Time Warner Taco Bell US Government Long Distance” are two of the many memorable lines in one of the most subversive, disturbing and bleakly hilarious movies of the 21st century.

For those who haven’t seen it, Idiocracy (2006) is the story of a dystopian future where anti-intellectualism is rewarded, advertising, commercialism and consumption have run rampant, and America has degenerated into a morally bankrupt society devoid of any social responsibility, any notion of human rights, and plagued by base sexual rutting, incoherent stupidity and outright hedonism.

It paints a bleak picture of a future where Starbucks now delivers handjobs, the lower chamber of Congress is called the “House of Representin’”, the new corporate slogan of Carl’s Jr has morphed from “Don’t Bother Me, I’m Eating” to “F*$k You! I’m Eating!”, and prospective lawyers can get their law degrees from Costco – “the finest law school in the land”.

The movie is without a doubt laugh-out-loud-until-your-belly-hurts-and-you-can’t-breathe hysterical.  It will also give you nightmares.

That’s because sadly so much of it is a dead-on accurate commentary about contemporary America’s demented and destructive mass consumption culture.

The top-rated TV show in Idiocracy is “Ow My Balls“, a 30 minute knee-slapper on the Violence Channel with no plot line and no story, about a guy who gets his berries racked in multiple different scenarios in each episode. “That’s absurd” you say… “That will never happen.” But the future is already here… Jackass, The Real Housewives of [insert city], Jersey Shore.

Or there’s the scene where President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho — a former porn star and professional wrestler — delivers his State of the Union address to a House chamber (sponsored by Pepsi and American Express) full of slack-jawed idiots in the House of Representin’

“Someone like that could never get elected” you say.  Ah, but remember Linda McMahon?  She was the U.S. Senate candidate in Connecticut who won the Republican primary and came within 3 points of winning on election day after spending $50 million of her own money. She was also the President and CEO of WWE, the largest professional wrestling company in the world.  Here’s a fun clip of McMahon in her WWE days prior to almost being elected to the U.S. Senate (vid corrects after first couple of seconds).

Can you say “Ow My Balls”?

Idiocracy’s plot thickens when the protagonist discovers that the world’s drought and dwindling food supplies are a result of the crops being irrigated with a Gatorade-like sports drink named “Brawndo – the thirst mutilator” after the company simply buys the Food and Drug Administration and the FCC and replaces virtually all water with the sports drink.

As a consequence, Brawndo has caused huge salt buildups in the soil rendering it inert.  In response to the protagonist’s plan to correct the problem by switching from Brawndo back to water (“yo, don’t you know that’s the same stuff in toilets?”), the White House cabinet members protest that “Brawndo’s got what plants crave.  It’s got electrolytes”, not grasping that electrolytes are simply the ions of dissolved salts.

Our corporate farms’ massive overuse and over-application of nitrogen fertilizers that destroy the soil would be the contemporary equivalent of course, as would our nation’s disastrous farm policy chock-full of idiocy like annual $5 billion pro-ethanol subsidies that raise food prices globally and take millions of acres of farmland out of production which could be used for more efficient and useful crops.

Whether it’s the frightening examples above or the classic “Welcome to Costco I love you” scene where big box shoppers waddle, chafe and scooter around a stadium sized warehouse buying up cheap Chinese made knick-knacks and doohickeys, Idiocracy is a humorous look at the destruction of human dignity and the special wretchedness caused by our out-of-control consumption based culture.

Is it elitist?  Unabashedly so… But not in a condescending, snooty, Vanity Fair brahmin-like Martha’s Vineyard way.  It’s a “fart joke” movie for the intellectual set. And for someone who’s actually taken his son to a monster truck rally and enjoyed every minute of it, Idiocracy’s tongue-in-cheek message isn’t so tongue-in-cheek.  It presents a damn frightening future that grows closer by the day and shows what happens when out-of-control consumption replaces more noble values like production, saving, self-reliance, sustainability and personal responsibility.

In other words, a pretty accurate depiction of America circa 2011.