The New Yorker Radio Hour - Andy Borowitz, and the Hunt for Invasive Lionfish

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Not only are we living in a time where people are proud of their ignorance, argues the writer and comedian Andy Borowitz, but some of our most educated politicians are now playing down their intelligence as a strategy to get elected. Borowitz, the author of the long-running satirical column The Borowitz Report, examines this phenomenon in his new book, “Profiles of Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber.” “When Trump was elected, a lot of us supposedly knowledgeable people were taken by surprise,” he tells David Remnick. “But the more I researched the past fifty years, the more likely and plausible—and maybe even inevitable—his election was, because he actually had a great deal in common with his forebears."  Plus, native to the waters of the Indo-Pacific, lionfish have proven themselves incredibly well adapted to the Atlantic coast. In their original habitat, the fish are kept under control by natural predators: groupers, eels, and sharks. But, elsewhere, predators can’t compete, and lionfish—with their voracious appetite and high fecundity—are upending the equilibrium of reef life. The staff writer D. T. Max takes a stab at lionfish spearing off the coast of Florida and talks with one of the most passionate lionfish hunters diving today, Rachel Bowman. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. You probably know Annie Borowitz from his column in The New Yorker The Borowitz Report. And he's been writing satire and humor for decades. He started out in the world of sitcoms. As a sitcom writer, you need characters that you can throw stuff to every week, week in, week out, who are dependable and we'll get the laugh. And politicians become kind of the...

little sitcom cast because we know how they're going to behave. We know that Rudy Giuliani is going to be a crazy drunk guy, and Marjorie Taylor Green is going to talk about Jewish space lasers. And so they become very reliable sources of comedy. It's probably not surprising at all that Andy ended up writing about politics. But his new book, well, funny, is not really satire. It's called Profiles and Ignorance. And Andy believes we're now living at a time that some of our

smartest, most educated politicians are actually just pretending to be dumb in order to get elected. Andy, welcome. The book is hilarious. The subtitle the book is how America's politicians got dumb and dumber. And it's mostly about, obviously, modern politicians. Were there no dummies early on? No, there were. Apparently this whole trend of dumbing down of politicians started during the 17th century. What happened in the 17th century was that the Puritans were big readers. They mainly read one book, but they were big readers. It was a good book. It was an excellent book. And then a bunch of Dutch revivalists came in and they started being much more theatrical and writhing on the floor and hollering and yelling and all this stuff. And so they quickly

upstaged the Puritans. And we've been sort of reenacting that ever since. where we like politicians who can perform over politicians who know stuff. What would you say is the zenith of politicians who know stuff? I assume it's the Enlightenment period and the period of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and things like that. Yes, I think that's true. And as a result, none of those guys are in my book because they're not funny. I focused really on the last 50 years.

And the reason why I did that, it wasn't totally arbitrary, which was that the last 50 years, was when TV got into the mix and really started with the Kennedy Nixon debates. Now, my point is this. Senator Kennedy has got to be consistent here. Either he's for the president and he's against the position that those who oppose the president in 55. Two guys, by the way, who were both well-informed. The problem was Kennedy was much better on TV than Nixon. He had much better hair. And that really sort of started the trend of politicians needing to have good hair whenever possible. So you got people like Rob Blagojevich and John Edwards

who had other problems. Blagojevich had fantastic hair. The best hair, the best hair. But what really happened with that debate was it taught people a lesson and it was kind of a dangerous lesson, which is it's important for politicians to be good on TV. And Republicans in California kind of reverse-engineered this.

And they said, rather than finding a politician like Nixon, who's well-informed but loses the gubernatorial election because he's horrible on TV, let's find somebody who's great on TV and doesn't know anything, but we can fill him with knowledge. And that's how we got Governor Ronald Reagan. You've heard a great deal about my lack of experience. That's true. Lack of experience actually in holding public office. But I know that there comes sometimes when if you want a job done, Maybe you get somebody in who hasn't found out all the things you can't do. The start of the book in some sense is Ronald Reagan's assent. Yes, he is the towering icon of ignorance in this story. And this is one thing I should say about the book is nothing in this book is just my opinion.

It's very documented. It's facts. It's not me just calling people names. I don't call people idiots. I will call them ignoramai because that is actually a technical term. Ignoramus is somebody who doesn't know things. But is it possible to argue that this enterprise, this discussion, is conservatives equals ignorant and liberal and to the left, it means enlightened somehow?

And one can only imagine that certain listeners listening to this, see, this is an exercise in left-leaning snobbery or condescension. That is a great question. I think that this issue of anti-intellectualism has really affected both parties. So Bill Clinton's a great example. Extremely well-educated guy, extremely full of knowledge. But when he first ran in 1992, there was a lot of concern that he was too wonky and too nerdy because he had gone to Yale law school and he'd been a Rhodes Scholar and had gone to Oxford. And the Democrats had a really bad record of nominating these guys who were considered eggheads. So by the time Clinton came around, this was a concern. And his way of addressing it, rather than owning how smart he was, is he started doing Elvis imitations.

And he went on the Arsenio Hall show and put on Raybans and played Heartbreak Hotel on the Sacks. And he was basically saying, hey, look, I'm not really that smart. And that was supposed to be a good thing. Talking about what kind of underwear he wrote. Yeah, exactly. on MTV, boxers or briefs. So it wasn't like the Democrats looked at this anti-intellectual trend and said, we'll have none of that. They eventually succumbed. And really, both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, when they were looking for a political role model for their presentation,

how to make their argument as a candidate, they looked to Ronald Reagan, one of the least informed presidents in American history. So the least informed president became a role model for some of our most egg-hedy politicians. Indy, you described the last 50 years of American politics as the age of ignorance, and you divided into three stages, ridicule, acceptance, and celebration. Yeah, to summarize, and ridicule, dumb politicians pretended to be smart. In the acceptance phase, George W. Bush, dumb politicians could be proud of being dumb. and then we have people like Josh Hawley who's extremely well-educated and extremely smart,

and they are part of what I would call the celebration phase of ignorance, which is they are smart guys pretending to be dumb because it helps them electorally. Tom Cotton is another, it seems. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, I mean, there's a whole lot of them. So long comes Donald Trump. Need I say more? and where does he fit in in all of this? Well, what was interesting in researching the book

was that, you know, when Trump was elected, a lot of us supposedly knowledgeable people were taken by surprise by this. It just seemed unfathomable, and it was like just such a sock in the gut. But the more I researched the past 50 years, the more likely plausible and maybe even inevitable his election was,

because he actually had a great deal in common with his forebears. But I think with him it was more, I think the thing that was different about him was that he was really the icon of the celebration phase in that his ignorance and his ability to make up facts and to say really recklessly dumb things like we should all ingest bleach. Right. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside. That became sort of a tribal banner that people wanted to waive. The notion that you had somebody who was saying things that were so ill-informed.

I somehow remember, and it seemed hilarious at the time, but it seems like almost nothing now, that the vice president of the United States, Dan Quayle, visited a classroom, and he I think corrected a school kid's spelling of the word potato, but unfortunately, Quayle got it wrong. Yeah, this happened in 1992 towards the end of his vice presidency, and he was in a middle school classroom, and actually the kid in question was named William Figueroa. The word he had to spell is potato, and Dan Quail said, you've almost got it right there. You need to add a little something at the end. And add one little bit on the end. Thank you, potato. How is it? He hectored the kid into adding an E, thus disfiguring his correctly spelled word.

And that really became the thing. That's the thing that he's best known for. And Trump misspelled things on Twitter about once every five days when he was still allowed on Twitter. Late last night, the president tweeted, despite the constant negative press, Caffe. And it never became an issue at all. There's been no shortage of comic writing about this. But at the same time, it doesn't embarrass Donald Trump to misspell a word every two seconds on Twitter.

I distinctly remember him saying, by way of compliment, I love the uneducated. Right. Where am I uneducated people? This kind of thing. And that's not to say that people who have not had the advantage of an advanced education or a fine one should be looked down on. In fact, I think Trump scorns them as much as he scorns anybody, but is able to use it to a political advantage is able to use the comedy about him to his political advantage, too. So what's to be done about this? Well, you know, this might be my cock-eyed optimism. I am an optimistic person,

actually, and I'm a little bit of an idealist. And I do think that history doesn't move in a straight line. I think we've been in a very dumb period. The last 50 years have been trending dumb words, clearly. But there's some hopeful signs. I thought it was really interesting that the good people of Alaska decided that they'd had enough of Sarah Palin. I think that Sarah Palin's status, as a national joke, really finally caught up with her. And I think it was a contributing factor. I think that there are other things about Sarah Palin that were a turnoff to people, the fact that she quit halfway through her term as governor probably didn't help her. I guess I feel after a while the times are such, and it's different from this sort of high moment of John Stewart and some of the, that it's

not always funny anymore. You know, that, you know, these conspiracy theories and Jewish space lasers and the things that come out of Trump's mouth and Ted Cruz's mouth, which would have, in a different context, seemed hilarious, now seem just dangerous. You ever feel that way? I think it's both, really. I mean, I feel like this might be a manifestation of my cock-eyed optimism, but I love this Will Rogers quote, and I quoted in the book where Will Rogers said, there's no trick to being a political humorist when you have the whole government working for you. And I feel that we've lived through really terrible times in this country, which in retrospect, they're in the midst of time now, the midst of the past, so we don't, we're not living them viscerally anymore. But the McCarthy era

was an era of conspiracy theories, and a lot of people's lives were ruined. It wasn't just a question of somebody tweeting out a nasty, mean tweet. It was entire careers were ruined. And, you know, the early 1950s through the 1960s was a time where we were living on the precipice of nuclear annihilation. That wasn't really funny either. And yet people still, George Carlin was making jokes. And Dr. Strange Love was made. Yeah. I mean, every now and then people will say things like Tom Lair, the comedy songwriter famously said that satire died when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. I just, I get his point, but I just don't think it ever dies because I think we've always lived in absurd, terrible times, some less terrible than others. But we find a way to laugh because it's

really our survival, I think. Andy Borowitz, thanks so much. Thank you. Andy Borowitz's new book is called Profiles in Ignorance. I'm David Remnick, more in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As a species, the lionfish is absolutely stunning to look at. They're native to the Indian and Pacific oceans, but maybe you've also seen them in aquariums.

They're very hard to miss. They have long, multicolored spines and bright colors. They're beautiful. They look like Las Vegas dancers. They look like something that nature invented to do. delight us. This is D.T. Max, Dan Max. He's a longtime writer for the magazine and he's covered topics from arts and culture to medicine and science, but he didn't expect himself to be on the lionfish beat. Most stories begin with either you read something somewhere and then you

make some, you send some emails or otherwise maybe somebody says something to you and you go, oh, that's a good story. This one began with my son needing to do something in the summer and deciding he was going to go to camp. He was looking online, and he found a camp in Belize called Reef Conservation International, and it had the usual environmental activities that you would expect in Belize. So, one thing they were going to do was a beach cleanup. Another thing, there was going to be a lot of environmental education and sustainability and species and so on. But none of that really interested either him or me. The really amazing thing was it also said that they were going to go on lionfish hunts.

And I thought, wait, this is an environmental organization that's going to take teenagers out and teach them how to kill something? So I started Googling it and talking to some of the sort of obvious people you would ask about this and found out that lionfish were an absolutely massive problem.

Outside the Indo-Pacific, you know, lionfish have no natural predators. And they themselves will eat almost anything. There's this one study that I won't ever forget and it calculated that lionfish can eliminate more than 80% of other species on a reef in just five weeks. And beyond that, they reproduce incredibly fast. A female lionfish can lay an average of 27,000 eggs every two and a half days, and they do it year round. There are several theories on how

lionfish wound up in the water, but my favorite, my favorite is that people had all these lionfish in their aquariums. And they started noticing that they had fewer and fewer other fish in their aquariums. And after a while, they realized that, in fact, the lionfish were eating their other fish.

And so they got irritated because, you know, people spent a lot of money on the fish in their aquariums. And they threw the lionfish into the canal in order to save the rest of their investment. The surprising thing is that when the lionfish

found themselves in the canal, they weren't the least bit distress to be there. And they quickly begin the process that we're talking about today of spreading. So they're first sighted off of the Atlantic coast of Florida in the mid-80s. Then, by 2004, they're seen in Bermuda. They're in Cuba by 2007 and the Yucatan Peninsula by 2009.

And really, the only thing that will limit their spread is that they don't survive winters and cold temperatures, otherwise they're unstoppable. All right. You guys all good? Questions? Perfect. All right, we're going to fire this up and head out. The thing is, you know, lionfish don't.

respond to bait, they're not interested in bait, and they won't, generally speaking, bite a hook. Now you can't net them because they live in reefs and crevices, so your net's going to catch on whatever they're hiding on. What you really actually have to do is you have to go in there and harvest them by hand. Diving, inside here there's a green pelican case that's got oxygen if we're your need to have, if we had some kind of situation. You know, I'm an adequate recreational diver, definitely nothing special, but I assumed I'd to hunt some lionfish.

That turned out not to be possible because lionfish live over 100 feet deep at this point. So what actually we did was a bit of a cheat or a workaround is to have another diver go down, bring up a bunch of lionfish to the surface, and then wait there for me. You know, lionfish vary in size, and they're bigger in the Atlantic and the Gulf

than they are in their native habitat, but they're about nine inches in length or so. The spear is really essentially a slingshot. It's about three feet long. It's made of fiberglass. It has these nasty prongs on the end. And it's launched by virtue of a kind of a rubber band, a very thick rubber band. And when you release it, it actually flies off with incredible speed.

Any way you want. Closer and pull it all the way back, all the way back. I keep missing. You can be like two inches from it. Eventually, I get the hang of the problem that I'm having with the spear, which is I put so much suntan lotion on, so much sun cream, that I can't hold the barrel of the spear. It's sliding away.

So they throw me a glove. I went right up to the lionfish. I released the spear via the rubber band, went through this quite small lionfish, and the lionfish died. I think that I felt essentially like I had done something kind of pointless. You know, no matter how bad, in quotes, lionfish are, no matter how invasive, no matter what they do to, like, the grouper stock and how they crowd out other species, you know,

getting in my head was the point that this leg is not their fault. I mean, we slapped these labels on these invasive species, even the word invasive sometimes made me laugh with the idea that this species had invaded us completely the opposite of what really happened. I mean, we grabbed it out of its native environment, put it in our dentist's office for show, and it got out. The thing is there's this whole community of people

who've really gotten into lionfish hunting. It's their passion. It's their hobby. They go out several times a week, and they see how many lionfish they can spear. There are even tournaments now with cash prizes for teams that bring back the biggest hall. And the person in this world who really caught my attention, the one who really fascinated me, is a woman named Rachel Bowman. Hello. Thank you for coming.

Rachel Bowman is a woman who lives in the Florida Keys and who is a bartender. That's her profession. But her name kept coming up again and again in sort of scientific papers. She's thanked often. And then when I would start interviewing scientists, they'd be like, oh, I went diving with Rachel Bowman. And I looked up, Rachel, and I watched some videos of her lion fishing. And she lionfishes, you know, with this kind of incredible intensity. You know, when you're diving, your main job is to survive.

I mean, I think that's what most divers have on their mind when they're 150 feet below the water. It's like, monitor my oxygen level, you know, keep everything under control, do my stops, my safety stops, get up, and I'm in good health. Rachel just seemed to have something utterly different on her mind. She had this almost kind of wild bloodlust for lionfish. At least that's what I was kind of interpreting

is I would watch these videos taken with GoPro's, you know, 100 feet under the water. Where'd you grow up? I'm from an island off the coast of North Carolina called Wrightsville Beach. My father was a commercial shripper and a charter boat captain, so I grew up definitely on the water, in the water. Moved to the Florida Keys. She comes from, you know, like many people who I met, she comes from a family that's interested in the well-being of the oceans, but not an environmental point of view. I'm a bartender.

I don't throw garbage on the ground I recycle It's not that I'm not Aware of the environmental Benefits of what I'm doing It's just not on my radar You know it's a little bit like people say I'm not a feminist but You know she functions really as an environmentalist

But she would not want to be called an environmentalist No what was your environmental consciousness as a as like a little girl Zero My dad was a commercial shopper. My house is full of, you know, pictures of my dad standing at the dock next to a big dead shark or a big dead Marlin. He wasn't a terrible person. There just wasn't that mindset. Absolutely, yeah.

And, I mean, anybody that's been on a shrimp boat, it's not pretty. What else comes up in that net and, you know, the regard for it? It took me a while to understand. And really, it was in Florida that. that it hit me full in the face for the first time, that this wasn't an environmental story at all. What this really was was a story about two aspects of modern America in conflict. So on the one hand, we have this out-of-control population in our waters,

and on the other hand, we have a highly motivated group that wants to control them at any price. And I thought to myself, you know, just to see these two in conflict, Just to watch how this plays out, you'd see something pretty amazing. How many dives do you think you've gone on for lionfish? Forget it. A thousand? Yeah.

Yeah. Five thousand? Yeah. Any remote estimate of how many pounds of... I couldn't even begin to give you that number. So do you make a living, more of a living from harvesting lionfish than from bartender? No. No. God, no.

No. No. What's the lionfish end of things, like, worth... I mean, 10 years are every year's different. Some years are, I mean, we had some terrible years, you know, and we had some years that, you know, I bought a boat. So. You bought a boat with your lionfish.

Yeah, Brittany Spears. To go get more lionfish. Yep. We were getting crap money for lionfish until May of 2016. I sold the very first lionfish to Whole Foods in May of 2016. They got a macerator, so they would take the really tiny ones and turn them into lionfish dumplings, which were delicious. They really, that was who changed the game for us as far as money.

So my dad died in February of that year, just a few months before that happened. But I think if my dad could have seen his little girl's picture in the frozen fish section of Whole Foods, I think his heart may have burst. I think that was the moment I finally made up for not being a boy. Do, um, uh, like, well, okay, so do you think that the war against lionfish is being won or lost? It's so funny, so somebody came into my bar the other day, and there were people sitting at the bar talking about lionfish. And they, you know, know who I am and what I do. And this guy kind of comes in mid-conversation and he sits down and he's listening.

And he goes, well, what's the point? And he said, well, I, you know, I read on. line that, you know, lionfish release, you know, 50 million eggs a year. So what's the point? And I looked at him and I said, well, first of all, that's an inaccurate number. It's like two million eggs a year, I think. And what's the point? I'm not sitting on a bar stool, you know, wheezing, being 300 pounds, drinking a beer. I'm out there doing something. That's the point. You know, and it's true what Rachel's saying. she's definitely not just sitting around. She's working really hard, even if it seems sometimes

like she's involved in an impossible, endlessly uphill battle. But I also think there's something else that motivates her, and it's this. Unlike other invasive species, unlike stink bugs, unlike cane toads in Australia, lionfish are edible. And they're not just edible, but they're really delicious. They taste like cod or some other tasty white meat fish that you'd want to eat. So if we looked at them from a different point of view, we could really say that lionfish aren't a scourge at all, but a gift, a gift of food, a really nutritious, low-fat food that people would actually want to eat. So then we just lack one thing. What we lack is a mechanism to efficiently harvest them because no amount of Rachel Bowman's in the water is ever going to get enough

lionfish to put them on tables across America. But I have hope still, because I have hope still, Because, and this is something that someone I interviewed told me, and it's really stuck with me, he said, if there's one thing humans are really good at, it's eradicating species for money. Staff writer, D.T. Max. You can find his full report on lionfish on our website, New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. And please don't hesitate to come to our website, New Yorker.com, if you're interested in tickets to any of our events to the New Yorker Festival, which is back for the first time and a long time, completely live on stage.

New Yorker.com is the place to go. Have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breda Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Puttuvali. Along with Jeffrey Masters, Willi, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May.

And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline and James Napoli. And special thanks this week to Jules and Flora Max for production help on location with staff writer DT Max. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.