http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_...

A short story by Cyril Kornbluth written in 1951, the Marching Morons postulates a world of the future where the average IQ is 45, because the educated and well-informed stopped their reproduction but the mentally deficient didn't. It's an interesting story, although trapped in the mentality of 1951.

One of the points of the story was how the average person in that society was so stupid that they had to be literally programmed in order to function. The protagonist, a modern-day man who was put in suspended animation for hundreds of years and awoke in the moron society, begins to notice this when he sees an ad for a TV comedy which has the punchline of "Would you buy it for a quarter?" A line which in and of itself has no real meaning or comic value. (This line was paraphrased in the movie Robocop by the way, to imply similar things.) Kornbluth used the example of the comic line, along with other examples, to show how stupid the public had become - the TV show would base the entire script around using the line "I'll buy that for a quarter!" in and of itself, and the audience had become programmed to laugh simply because it was told to laugh when someone would use the line. They found the line funny because they were told to, and not because of any kind of humor value inherent in it or some allusion to something funny. They were programmed.

So...I can't help but laugh a little inside, when I see a pickup truck that has a sticker on it which reads "Git 'R' Done!"