How I Pooped My Pants

Forrest Gump might just be the quintessential American movie of the 1990s, summing up, in a technically brilliant package, the American dream (perhaps more accurately referred to as the ‘American Myth’) of an everyman, and not a particularly bright one at that, achieving greatness. This is a film that reduces people possessing a certain worldview, wishfully optimistic and perhaps more than a little naïve, to tears with great regularity. This is an American hero? A teacher of mine, who taught psychology at a university for 30 yrs, used to drill me on the degrees of stupidity: “morons are smarter than imbeciles are smarter than idiots.” (Collier) Forrest, with his I. Q. of 75, fits somewhere in the middle of this scale, yet breezes through life. He was a college football star, a war hero and a successful businessman, the quintessential American success story.
He got a college football scholarship when a coach saw him running across the football field. “Gump the fo...