The Cuban Missile Crisis is distant enough now that it can only be read as a kind of can't be fun.

All those Slim Harvard boys with their

boys with their Brahmin accents and J-Press suits. So it stands to reason that we feel like their problems and their politics

and the pro-sumer quality of their munitions and especially their telephones, and crucially, the danger that they faced were similarly just elements of some

porcelain stage play where the boys wore coconut bras and they all sang butter cup.

I mean Castro was such a funny furry little bear with his Groucho cigar and his coffee can hat and Cruz Chef stomping

around trying to kill the wabbitt, standing on two dictionaries to marvel at the electric

washer, how could these silly men have posed any real threat to the world?

And then there's our own John Kennedy, long carved in stone on the tabloid Rushmore,

an ancient Greek, a hero who guards us even now while we sleep, dreaming of a greater

Martin Sheen still in the White House reading hard books.

He liked keeping us safe. This was all so long ago they may as well have been in Togas.

But just for context, my dad had his 41st birthday during the missile crisis. It wasn't that long ago. I still have some

of his suits from that period and their killer. There was nothing inevitable about the

outcome. None of those guys were that much smarter than you or me or Ricky Gervais or James Franco.

The fact is that even the smartest people aren't that smart.

People are idiots. I used to think you had to be smart to be the president and

then Reagan got elected and even at age 12 I could tell he wasn't smart.

George Bush the elder had the kind of intelligence of a school headmaster that gets pranked

the same way every Halloween and never sees it coming. Clinton was Rotarian smart, but George

W, do you remember all the commentariat at the time saying

George W sounds like an idiot and he acts like an idiot but don't underestimate

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