Is Mike Judge the New Nostradamus?

I’m really worried about the future.

When I was a kid, I saw this movie narrated by the great Orson Welles. Now, I was a kid, so I didn’t know he was the GREAT Orson Welles of Citizen Kane fame, or War of The Worlds or the Mercury Players. I just thought he was the guy trying to sell Paul Masson wine in a timely fashion.

In any case, the film was The Man Who Saw Tomorrow and it was all about how this 16^th century French astrologer and physician Michel de Notredame (Nostradamus) wrote this semi-cryptic 942 volume of poetry, the Quatrains, and predicted everything that was going to happen to humanity. Mostly it was all tragedy. He allegedly predicted Napolean (who he called the first antichrist), Hitler which he misspelled (the second antichrist), and he even envisioned the atomic bomb, which was pretty good considering that he was about four-hundred years ahead of his time. He also predicted the dystopian future and the end of the world. That plagued me for a while as a kid, but then as time went on, I found myself distracted by the real problems of the dystopian present. I didn’t think too much about old Nostradamus, except as a punchline for the most mundane of problems, such as “I think Nostradamus predicted that we should have gotten gas back there in Vegas” or “you know, he did warn us about disco.”

Anyway, I haven’t thought a lot about old Nostradamus, until recently. I was channel surfing through the million and a half options of new programming, and finding nothing good, ended up watching Idiocracy. If you don’t know the movie, it is about the greater intellectual decline of humanity fostered by technology, lowered standards, and the rising cult of personality overcoming genuine thought. The plot follows a very average everyman who is frozen and awakens in the future to find that no one can think. Literacy and critical reason are all but gone. There is a great scene at a clinic where the patient enters complaints ala symbols instead of words (emojis anyone?) The top-rated TV show is a contextless series of vignettes of men being struck in the testicles called “Ow, my balls.” America’s favored beverage is an electrolyte brew called Brawndo which has been devastatingly used to water crops. Ultimately, the guy becomes the leading intellect of the era and saves the world much to the delight of the president who addresses Congress in a nearly incoherent fashion. So, like I said…

Just like that, it hit me. Mike Judge is Nostradamus. I think there is a pretty good argument for that.

Just look at his body of work. The guy has been predicting the future for quite a while. Unlike the French dude, he doesn’t use murky poetry, he employs a slier vehicle of comedy.  I’ll give some examples.

There was Beavis and Butthead, of course, two ludicrously stupid guys that captured America by storm. Or were they really harbingers of what was to come? I mean, in 2026, only 31% of 4^th graders read at level. 39% can do math. Just saying.

I’ve already talked about Idiocracy but then comes the most terrifying forecast of all.

The brilliant Silicon Valley told of an awful future resulting from misapplied Revenge of the Nerds fueled technological advances: of android love, of an autonomous vehicle which put a guy in an offshore shipping container, and a near apocalyptic AI achievement that was selflessly killed by the creators before it could unleash its dominion over all concerned.

Pretty prescient.

So now, as I look around looking for new programming, it is always with a slight edge of fear that I might find something new from Judge. I have to ask myself, will the new show foretell something too terrible even as I laugh my way to a grim end? You may say I am being paranoid.  I don’t know, but the things he has come up with are awfully accurate and I never once saw him misspell Hitler.

Then again, maybe we’ll luck out and find that Judge is really just Jonathan Swift instead?

I think that I’ll contemplate that for a while. Maybe I’ll just pour myself a big 32 ouncer of Brawndo and kick back as I binge watch every known episode of Ow, My Balls.