Why? That’s the question I can’t answer.

Colin Jost, the comedian who drew the short straw and had to host the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, recited a long list of Trump’s glaring defects and then asked the unanswerable question, “The race is tied?” Twice. In case you didn’t hear the first time.

Biden made the same point in his turn at the microphone. “I’m a grown man running against a six year old. What the hell?”

Trying to figure out why so many Americans are willing to tell pollsters that they would vote for Trump has become a major industry. I asked my wife if she had a theory. She said, “No. I have the final, irrefutable answer.” I said, “Yes, dear.”

Her theory is that Homo sapiens peaked out (Just about when she and I were born, actually.) and evolution has been going backward for our species since then. As a species, we’re getting dumber and dumber. I said, “Yes, dear.”

That idea has a certain compelling attraction. For example, the vast majority of Americans believe that government spending is out of control and should be drastically cut back … as they max out their credit cards at historic rates.

I think that there hasn’t been quite enough time for that scale of change to happen. It took Homo sapiens about 5,000 years to totally wreck the entire ecosystem of Earth. (Or, about 3% of the time that dinosaurs were the top species.) It’s only been … ummm … less than a century since Homo sapiens peaked out as my wife and I were born.

My theory is that it has become a fad for people to have contrarian opinions today. The White House Correspondents Dinner is a good example. That kind of trash talk used to be confined to baseball games and lectures about the economy. I can remember when movies would only show the President in profile out of reverence for the office. It was sort of like the early Moslems and Hebrews being afraid to pronounce the name of God. Now, any kind of insane idea is considered to be perfectly normal. “Ja! The Earth really is flat. Columbus faked it all in a CGI video.” Newscasters sagely nod their heads and just move on to the latest poll about Trump versus Biden.

When I was a kid, EVERYBODY had a hula hoop. There were hula hoop contests, hula hoops made out of spaghetti, hula hoop strippers, even people my age could twirl one.

I hope we get over this one real soon now. I might live long enough to actually see the end if it doesn’t.