Bill Maher Blames Stan Lee for Making America Stupider
On Saturday, Bill Maher added a new post to the Real Time with Bill Maher blog. That normally wouldn't merit much attention, but this was the week Stan Lee died and, well, Maher was pretty eager to share his apathy: "The guy who created Spider-Man and the Hulk has died, and America is in mourning. Deep, deep mourning for a man who inspired millions to, I don’t know, watch a movie, I guess."
Maher's beef isn't with Stan Lee necessarily. Just anyone he considers intellectually stunted enough to like Lee's work. He enjoyed reading comics (when he wasn't reading real books) as a kid, he writes:
But then twenty years or so ago, something happened – adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature. And because America has over 4,500 colleges – which means we need more professors than we have smart people—some dumb people got to be professors by writing theses with titles like Otherness and Heterodoxy in the Silver Surfer. And now when adults are forced to do grown-up things like buy auto insurance, they call it “adulting,” and act like it’s some giant struggle.
The great thing about Maher's take is that it's the same complaint grumpy, middle-aged men have made about T.V. or rap or vaping: "Young people are worse now because of what they like." In this case, not just worse, but with dumber values. He concludes by connecting Lee to the burning dumpster of U.S. politics, writing, "I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to suggest that Donald Trump could only get elected in a country that thinks comic books are important.”
Bill Maher has built a career off a remarkable skill: voicing completely average opinions of middle-aged white dudes and making it sound edgy. What he presents as intellectual and rebellious ideas are often just garden-variety bigotry like islamophobia and transphobia. But he can turn those unremarkable opinions into attention, and once again, he's gotten what he was after.
