The Complete Idiot's Guide to Complete Idiot's Guides
by Mitch Stone, the Accidental Expert
What a bunch of complete idiots. Just look at all those dummies.
I'm talking to you. And me. We're all total dingbats.
Don't be insulted -- idiocy is no longer something to hide. No, these days we're allowed to celebrate our foggiest notions; we pin them on our lapels with pride.
How do I know? By the millions, we're marching into real and virtual bookstores, shamelessly snatching up books declaring on their very covers that their buyers are dummies and idiots. This mass admission of feeble-mindedness must be one of our era's more notable cultural phenomena.
And it's no tiny trend, either. A quick search of the online Amazon.com bookstore turned up nearly 2,000 "Complete Idiot" and "For Dummies" titles.
Stupidity, it seems, is one of America's growth industries.
This remarkable library of books for dopes covers the complete gamut of topics about which we know nothing, and care to know very little. Religion,
for reasons which elude this particular dolt, is currently one of the top-selling subjects.
Other popular reading topics for admitted birdbrains include international politics, gardening, investment, and health care. Amazon.com's current top-selling title is "Pregnancy for Dummies." Now there's a subject you shouldn't learn about on the street.
But no single topic seems to inspire more stupidity then technology. It's no coincidence that the "for dummies" trend began over 20 years ago, with a book about Tandy computers. Since then, technology's capacity to make us feel like total morons has grown exponentially.
Of the over 1,000 "For Dummies" titles available at Amazon.com, in excess of 800 are technology-related. More than a quarter of those are for Microsoft products alone. That's one heck of a lot of mindlessness.
And if you doubt your own stupidity for even a moment, try asking your friendly local technologist. As he'll probably be happy to volunteer, it's the dullards out there who are responsible for the proliferation of computer viruses -- the nincompoops who don't keep up with all the latest operating system security patches and virus protection software. It's the boneheads who click on e-mail attachments.
In short, the calamity on your computer is your fault. Our failure to command a constantly growing level of complexity is to blame, not the technology itself.
But the dumbest thing about the "complete idiots" trend is that we've taken our collective indignity a step further. We no longer feel any sense of regret about being called blockheads.
Dipping into the reviewer's guide at Amazon.com is to find one reader after another describing these books as "breezy" and "accessible," but never "shallow" or "insulting." The passive acceptance of these inherently insulting titles suggests the need for an Irony for Dummies guide.
The Web site of the owner of the massive "Idiots" franchise, MacMillian and Company, offers only a hint of an apology for their deprecating book titles.
"You're no idiot," they declare. You're "smart, curious, at ease with yourself, and interested in learning." MacMillian supposes we're suave, erudite, and self-confident sorts of ninnies. So although we might be professed ding-a-lings, at least we're not Beavis and Butthead.
Wiley & Sons runs the "Dummies" empire, proudly claiming over 100 million clods as customers. In a triumph of public relations over the English language, they proclaim, "Dummies readers aren't dumb... dummies products are for people who are... intelligent, frustrated or intimidated."
Perhaps. But at best, these books are "education lite" -- a means of making superficial sense of complex subjects. At worst, they serve as an escape clause for the makers of bad products -- products that should not make us feel stupid, but do. And it doesn't take much smarts to realize that if we become comfortable calling ourselves imbeciles, then it's a title we will have earned.
8 May 2002 |
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