The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth
Accidental suspended animation & dumbed-down society
In 1988, real estate agent and con artist John Barlow is placed in suspended animation after a freak accident. He is revived in the distant future, in a confusing world filled with hypersexualized advertisements, vapid entertainment, and people who exhibit erratic, nonsensical behavior. Shortly after being revived, Barlow is introduced to two men, Tinny-Peete and Ryan-Ngana, who inform him that the lamentable state of society is the fault of the "morons", the world's vast population of unintelligent people, who greatly outnumber the much smaller population of intelligent people.
Inspiration taken from Nazi Germany
Taking inspiration from his knowledge of fraudulent real estate deals, propaganda techniques employed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, and the myth of lemmings drowning themselves in the sea, Barlow devises a plan for the extermination of the moron population. Barlow orchestrates a massive propaganda campaign encouraging the morons to migrate to the planet Venus.
It's available online here, which allows me to confirm that search for metals:
He had hoped the field would turn out to be a cemetery, preferably a once-fashionable cemetery full of once-massive bronze caskets moldered into oxides of tin and copper.
and the details about the accidental suspended animation:
In 1988 Mr. Barlow, a leading Evanston real estate dealer, visited his
dentist for treatment of an impacted wisdom tooth. His dentist
requested and received permission to use the experimental anesthetic
Cycloparadimethanol-B-7, developed at the University.
After administration of the anesthetic, the dentist resorted to his
drill. By freakish mischance, a short circuit in his machine delivered
220 volts of 60-cycle current into the patient. (In a damage suit
instituted by Mrs. Barlow against the dentist, the University and the
makers of the drill, a jury found for the defendants.) Mr. Barlow
never got up from the dentist's chair and was assumed to have died of
poisoning, electrocution or both.
Morticians preparing him for embalming discovered, however, that their
subject was—though certainly not living—just as certainly not dead.
The University was notified and a series of exhaustive tests was
begun, including attempts to duplicate the trance state on volunteers.
After a bad run of seven cases which ended fatally, the attempts were
abandoned.
