Disable jquery in themes?

Jquery in the past had security issues undetected for months and I really dont see the need for throwing another layer at the browser to slow it down. Can you turn it off without ripping apart the internals (reverse engineer the dom)? Was thinking about using cpanel, and I know past themes were cryptic enough to work on. Jquery is for people who dont bother to learn css or dont like the syntax, in my opinion, another layer to slow you down. Maybe I am better off making something from scratch if I have to decipher that jibberish (jquery is a template file of common css styled condensed and compressed into functions, with no white space in a huge file, for those that don't know). Maybe if you are a search engine, and want to insert another interperter in the browser like Dr Doom, that makes sense, but otherwise, no?