Has stupidity become a virtue?  Something to promote and encourage?  I wouldn't think so but some recent television commercials indicate otherwise.
    In a beer commercial, a guy trapped in a corner by a bear appears to be successfully negotiating with the bear to take his beer instead of him when his good friend runs up, grabs the beer, and runs off leaving him to deal with the bear.  The message of this stupidity commercial seems to be: your friend isn't worth a bottle of cheep beer.  Or maybe: you can always get new friends, but you can't get another beer (really! why not!).
    In a series of commercials for beef jerky we see young men eating beef jerky than doing extremely stupid things like throwing rocks at Bigfoot.  The message of these commercials seems to be: Beef jerky makes you behave as if you have the intellegence of a root vegetable so run out and buy a case!  The commercials don't say if the ability of beef jerky to make you stupid is temporary or permanent.
    In the most recent entry, a soft drink company is promoting it's beverage by showing some idiot cooking the can in a microwave creating a miniature electric storm.  I can't imagine how this would convince anyone to buy the product, but then. I'm not into stupid.
    I don't know how successful these commercials have been, but I think Corona has been very successful with their beer commercials that promote relaxation and cleverness rather than stupidity, so I'm hopeful that the commercials are wrong and stupid is not considered a virtue.