In his penultimate album, the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has a lyric, “You got me wishing, wishing our little love would last / You got me thinking like those people of the past.” And isn’t that the point of reading old books? To step into the shoes of people from a bygone age to see what exactly was on their minds?

Well, that’s what I think, and that’s why Little Red Reviewer’s Vintage Science-Fiction Month is such a valuable tradition. It gives us an excuse to go back to those sci-fi books of yesteryear, and see what, if anything, they can say to us in 2026. Well, what can “The Marching Morons” from 1951 tell us about the world of today?

The book is set in the future, and begins with a humble potter excavating the ruins of the University of Chicago, where he finds a man called “Honest John Barlow”, who back in the 1980s had been placed in a state of suspended animation. With modern technology, he is quickly revived, and enters into his new reality, which, from books and films he has seen, he assumes will be high-tech, enlightened, and advanced.

However, Barlow quickly finds that all is not as he anticipated. Much of the world’s population lives in congested mega-cities, driving in cars that claim to go incredibly fast, but are actually modified with rigged speedometers that claim to go ten times faster than they do. The populace is awash in crude, vapid entertainment and hyper-sexualized electronic advertising. Current events, meanwhile, seem to be nothing but apathetic news personalities recounting one massive technological disaster after another and politicians speaking in ungrammatical and semi-literate soundbites.

Barlow, again falling back on his own reading of science fiction, assumes that the masses have been enslaved by a cadre of elites, and that the government handlers he has been assigned are the secret police of the tyrannical government that has let this occur. He demands to speak to their leadership.

Surprisingly, this request is granted, and they explain to him the the has got the situation all wrong: it is the billions of morons who have enslaved the relatively small handful of competent people still remaining. The latter are the people who keep the world (barely) functioning, supporting the ever-expanding hordes of imbeciles.

If this sounds as familiar to you as it did to me, it’s probably because it is almost exactly the plot of the 2006 comedy film Idiocracy. But here is where the two stories diverge, because while Idiocracy was a rather lighthearted comedy, “The Marching Morons” takes a much darker turn.

Barlow’s nickname is ironic, you see. He didn’t build a career in real estate back in his own time by being exceptionally ethical. And when the leadership of Earth explain their predicament to him, he responds by offering them a typically ruthless deal: he will help them with their moron problem, if they will name him Supreme World Dictator and give him money, power, and prestige. Not knowing what else to do, they agree to his demands, and Barlow then sets about implementing a massive propaganda campaign to sell the morons on the idea of vacations to Venus, and creating a program to dismantle the cities and use the material to build rockets which will take them to the supposed Venusian paradise.

Barlow, who is a bit of a racist in addition to his proclivity for shady real estate dealings, is a student of mid 20th-century Germany, and borrows heavily from that period in his plans for dealing with his captive population. Needless to say, his rockets do not actually go to Venus.

It’s not a long story. It appeared in Galaxy Magazine, where it took up a mere 30 pages, complete with very 1950s illustrations. (You can view it here.) Indeed, for a science-fiction story, it contained relatively little world-building. And yet, I did not feel that this was a serious problem; for it was as if the setting seemed already established in my mind. 

It’s always interesting, as I said, to know what “those people of the past” were thinking about. It’s even more interesting, once you know that, to speculate on what they would think about us, if they could know about our time. What would C.M. Kornbluth make of 2026, if he could see it? Well, I have an idea, but I’ll not put words in his mouth. Read the story, and decide for yourself.