Maybe this is connected to the plight of the mentally ill in this country, who are ignored, shunned, stigmatized, until still-functioning people with real problems are afraid to seek help. Maybe people figure that if they weren't monsters, we'd do better by them.
On the other hand, we do pretty well by stupid people, even erecting shrines to the idea that they're morally superior to people with more complicated thinking processes: these can take the form of a movie like Forrest Gump, or the kind of press coverage that George W. Bush enjoyed until about 2006...
I always thought that the movie industry's evolution from Being There to Forrest Gump spoke volumes about how the U.S. has changed between the '70s and today.
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