Among the pantheon of terrible Christmas songs, I’m especially haunted by Relient K’s 2006 cover of The 12 Days of Christmas. Being 2006, most of the music was terrible, but Relient K were (are?) also a Christian alt rock band, meaning they’re a special sort of awful. In their cover they go through the 12 Days of Christmas, and most of the lyrics are unchanged. The main addition is a chorus where they belt out: “What’s a partridge? What’s a pear tree? I don’t know so please don’t ask me.” It – what? You can understand someone maybe not knowing what a partridge is – it’s not one of the most common birds out there. You don’t immediately conjure up the image when you hear it. It’s not a seagull. But how do you not know what a pear tree is? This is not by any means a new or innovative point, but the 2000s, particularly in American media, had this real witlessness. They took a very specific pride in being stupid, in highlighting their lack of understanding on a particular topic.

Relient K’s Christmas song is just one example – there are plenty of others, and if you lived through the period you will have your own. One of the ones that sticks with me is Agent Cody Banks, a 2003 kids comedy film starring Frankie Muniz as a child spy, in the vein of Young James Bond or Alex Rider. It’s a stupid horny film where most of the jokes revolve around sexual harassment, including one sequence that’s aged particularly poorly where Cody uses his x-ray glasses to look at women’s underwear. The plot of the film has Cody attempt to befriend a young Hilary Duff, at the time incredibly popular as Lizzie McGuire. He is told that her interests include horse riding and TS Eliot, and so he goes up to her and says hey I really love TS Eliot, I love how she captures the female experience. Hilary Duff naturally turns around and says – TS Eliot is a man. The joke here is that Cody Banks is stupid. Duff is cultured and intelligent, she reads modernist poetry, and Cody Banks is a skateboarder. In the strictest sense it’s treated as a character flaw, but in the long run it doesn’t matter. Cody Banks saves the day by being spunky and adventurous. His ignorance is funny, but ultimately not a problem that needs to be overcome. There’s actually a similar sequence in Agent Cody Banks 2 – in a different context, but structurally it’s almost identical. Cody Banks is working with a handler, played by Anthony Anderson. Anderson attends a high society event in a Nigerian boubou, and Banks jeers, “Nice dress, Derek.” As in the first film, Cody’s ignorance is named and countered – everyone explains to Cody what a boubou is, and the scene moves on – but again we see a contrast between Banks as the stupid young American and his blonde, cultured female counterpart, played in the second film by Hannah Spearitt from S Club 7.

The 00s in general I think can be characterized as the stupid decade, so much is the focus on idiocy and the figure of the moron. The vacuous consumerism of the 80s and 90s was obviously exploded by 9/11, which prompted a long run of disaster and apocalypse movies – but also, I think, the paired phenomenon of tales of the American idiot. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which for my money is sort of the archetypal post-9/11 disaster movie, came out in 2005. It sits at the head of a whole host of other disaster or apocalypse movies from the period – 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Poseidon, The Impossible (a Ewan McGregor film about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami), and I’d even include zombie apocalypse films like 28 Days Later. All of these films focus on the exteriority of disaster, on the lived and experienced effects. In War of the Worlds, it’s about the carcass of the crashed plane, the rubble. It’s about Tom Cruise coated in dust and grime in a pretty direct visual reference to the images of first responders coming away from the Towers. All of these films are paired with the more interior books and stories, all the soul-searching titles looking for the root of the problem in American cultural decline. Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men came out in 2001. Green Day’s American Idiot was 2004, and Idiocracy was 2006. All through these years the media was dominated by stories about Bush’s verbal gaffes in interviews and speeches – his Bushisms. It’s the same thing that led people to circulate Caitlin Upton‘s faltering answer in a Miss Teen USA pageant in 2007 (“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps”). Agent Cody Banks and the Relient K Christmas song are very minor titles in that lineage, but they both tap into the themes of American stupidity that seem so directly to rise out of 9/11. It’s considered a cultural malaise but also embraced as a form of identity. It’s a problem and a point of honour, and it led to a bunch of really obnoxious, stupid art. What’s a partridge? What’s a pear tree? Awful.