The Dummy Belt

Those of us in states that fall in the bottom third of the nation in terms of economic, social and cultural success have a saying from which we take comfort: thank god for Mississippi. Our poverty, ignorance and poor health may be bad, but it'll never be that bad.

But now Beeryblog has crunched the numbers, and we can't deny it any more.

We are a land of many ‘belts’: the Bible Belt, the Rust Belt, the Sun Belt, to name a few.

But watching the near dissolution of our political institutions and our international reputation as a scientific, medical, and cultural leader at the hands of ideologically puritanical and intellectually useless base idiots, the time has come to name another of America’s ‘belts’: the DUMMY BELT.

This belt encompasses a swath of the United States that, were it drop-kicked from the Union, would instantly join the likes of Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau among the world’s most primitive societies. A grotesque mutation joining Iranian theocracy and Central African poverty would emerge, despoiling the planet and setting back global progress a dozen generations merely by existing.

But alas, God has cursed First-World states by saddling them with responsibility for the well-being of barbaric theocrats and tribalists. And our nation many years ago made the cataclysmic misstep of bestowing on these nether regions multifarious statehoods and representatives.

SNIP

My identification of a Dummy Belt here should not be taken to disparage all residents thereof; no doubt, progressives in this region often feel like aliens in their own land. And it might be well for us to consider a paradigm like that portrayed in the movie Escape From New York:

Perhaps we should fence in the Dummy Belt (you know how Baggers love fences), ship all Baggers to there, evacuate all reasonable human beings therefrom, and let the Dummy Belt suffer its inevitable mindless demise without dragging the rest of us down with it. (We may want to reserve to ourselves some of the coastal property where we can swim and vacation, but we can work out those details some other time.)
To identify the Dummy Belt, I selected four criteria:

Percentage of voting population that is evangelical
Bachelor’s degrees per capita
High-school drop-out rates
Infant mortality

There are doubtless other criteria that could be used, but I selected those that seem to most directly bear on the idiocy and backwardness of a region.

SNIP

Here is America’s DUMMY BELT:

For a more detailed explanation of the Dummy Belt, and suggestions for how to deal with it, read the whole thing.