Idiots Differ

Take Marjorie and Junior

            How can two people who grew up in the same small town, both of whom have the gift of gab, and both of whom have found success by being widely regarded as idiots --

            How can two such people have turned out so differently?

            Both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Junior Samples spent their formative years in Cumming, Georgia. When they were growing up (though Marjorie was only nine when Junior died in l983), the town was still rural and virtually all white, with an especially terrible white-supremacist history.

            When Junior died, at 57, he had weighed, in his time, almost 400 pounds. As a mainstay of the extremely popular country-comedy sketch-TV show, Hee Haw, he delivered some of his idiocy while lying on his back. Which in his case looked natural. Sometimes, as I recall, there was a background of pigs.

            Marjorie is still extant. If Junior were alive today, and had been dieting severely, Marjorie might be just about almost able to lift him off the ground. She is profoundly into something Junior never would have touched: Crossfit. She has done a 285-pound back squat and a 300-pound deadlift. That’s not her idiocy. Her idiocy is her work as a member of the U. S. House of Representatives.

            I can't find any evidence online that either Junior or Marjorie has ever commented on the salient event of Cumming's history: in 1912, after a white woman was raped and murdered, white vigilantes permanently drove all 1,098 of Cumming’s black residents out of town, except for one whom they mutilated and lynched and two whom they hanged after a sham trial.

            Maybe that history has had something to do with how extremely idiotic Junior was and Marjorie is. But their idiocies are very different.