We Are a Stupid People

I was in line at the post office on Monday, trying to mind my own business. There were two women in front of me, talking loudly ("talkin' loud"), kind of taking up too much space and energy. So I was noticing them, and when they got up to the counter, I couldn't help but listen. Of course! The older one, who was about my age, maybe a little younger, asked for stamps. Her daughter had sent her to buy 100 stamps, and they had to be the perforated kind. Lisa, the postal clerk, opened the notebook and pointed to the various stamps, telling her which ones were perforated. "These and these and these, not these, not these, these, these, not these." After some deliberation, the woman decided that the car stamps would be best, since they were for a garage.

"They're perforated, right?"
Lisa said, yes, they were.

She paid for them, taking the little glassine stamp envelope and checking again to make sure they were perforated. Yes, Lisa assured her, they were.

Now. There was nothing apparently wrong with this woman, other than a lack of social manners (i.e., "Don't carry on your conversations as if everyone else wants to hear them."). Her daughter had sent her to the post office to buy stamps, with actual money. Right? I'm assuming she drove there. Maybe not, but she got there somehow.

As they walked past me on their way out, she said to her companion, "At least they're perforated. I don't even know what 'perforated' means. I'm not on the level I should be."

Indeed.

I've been wondering about this woman ever since. She wasn't ancient. She wasn't so young as to be clueless. She didn't appear to be disabled in any way. She was not from Another Country.

So how do you live in the US for decades, shop and buy things, handle money and make transactions, and not know what "perforated" means? I do not think she meant that she did not know the etymology of the word. No, I'm not thinking that's the case.

Does she not receive bills in the mail, the ones with the perforated please-return-this-portion top part? Does she never use a notebook, with the damned micro-perf pages (which, in case you didn't know, I loathe)? She was old enough to remember postage stamps before they were peel-and-stick, back when they came in perforated sheets. How can you live in the world and not know what perforated means? How can you function? Because--and here's the scary part--if you do not know this, what else do you not know?

This bothers me a lot. I want to know more. I want to know what she does all day, who she talks to (TO WHOM, dammit!), what she watches on tv. I'm guessing maybe she doesn't read. I'm not saying she CAN'T read; I'm guessing she probably doesn't do it voluntarily. There's a big difference between being able to read and actually reading.

I'm guessing she spends a lot of time with her television, but that may just be my own personal prejudice. But if so, it kind of disproves that "oh, but tv can be so educational!" argument. Sure, maybe it CAN be, but it's usually not. Kind of like being ABLE to read. . . .

So I'm all bummed out about rampant ignorance (don't even get me started about the things we've seen in schools) when I start reading my back issues of Mental Floss. I picked up a copy last month and enjoyed it so much I ordered all the available back issues--30 of them--as a treat. I liked the article about the history of ice; it made me happy. Now, I was a little leery about the magazine, not knowing the credentials of the staff and writers. Where do they get their information? You just have to hope to hell they're not getting off the internet. But since I enjoyed reading it, I thought I'd give it a go.

Last night I get to the end of the first issue. Not Issue #1, but the first one that was still available. In the back, there's a quiz. Now, I have to skip all the questions about popular culture, because I have less than a clue about those. Who are Lasse Hallstrom, Fritz Lang, David Lynch, and Wong-kar Wai? I've heard vaguely of Lynch, but only so very vaguely.

[I do not need to know this shit. Oh, you're thinking, it's because you think you can look it up on the internet any time you need to know it. Wrong. It's not because I have the internet. It's because I have Roz. And also Wendy and Paula and Karen. Among them, they know almost everything there is to know. See, I do not count myself among the stupid. Why is that? Ego, you say? No: it's because I know there's a whole shitload of stuff I don't know and will never know. So I have reallyreallyreally smart friends. They know tons of stuff that the rest of us don't have room for in our brains. Roz, for example, calls herself a Movie Slut. A lot of what she does for fun--beading, for instance--can be done while watching movies. So if there ever comes a time when I need to know who Wang-kar Wai is, I'll call up Roz. No, wait: Roz never actually answers her phone. I'll e-mail her. Or I'll ask Wendy, who's also brilliant and who, although not technically a Movie Slut, has the advantage of 1) almost always answering her phone and 2) having an iPhone [did you know that spellcheck can't find "voilà" or "glassine," but it has no trouble at all with "iPhone"? Jesus.], she can look up stuff no matter where she is.]

The second question was this:
2. A disease that is present at birth but is not hereditary is described as:
A. Communicable
B. Acute
C. Carcinogenic
D. Congenial

No. I did not make a mistake on D. That's what it said: "congenial." At first I thought I'd mis-read it. Then I thought it was some clever joke and that I was mistaking a joke quiz for a real one. So I read over all the other questions and answers; and as far as I can tell, it was supposed to be a legitimate quiz. So then I got pissed. I had to get up, go through the house (it was late and the heater had already shut itself off for the night, grumble, grumble) and find the next consecutive issue of the magazine and find the apologies and corrections page. Sure enough, they got a ton of mail about this. But instead of saying, gee, sorry, we're idiots, they made a joke that pissed me off even more: they said they left the "t" out on purpose because they didn't want their mothers to read "genital" in their magazine.

Jesus. They make a mistake and think it's cute to blame it on not offending their mothers? What is this, a high school exercise? Did I just buy 30 issues of the Fightin' Tigers' year-end journalism project?

And, to further irritate the crap out of me, there was #8:
A beatnik was part of the Beats; a hippie was part of the "hip" movement; what is a yuppie?
A. a "young, enterprising person" [wouldn't that be a "yeppie"?]
B. a "young, upwardly-mobile, professional" [no need for that second comma, guys]
C. a "youth of precious nature" [what the fuck? yppn? what are we DOING, people?]
D. a "youth of pretentious background" [OK, now we're just being silly. also irritating as hell.]

I don't know when these people were born, but the definition of "yuppie," when the term came into use, was "young urban professional." See? And here? And here?

Sure, you can find places that give the "upwardly mobile" definition, but that's not the one that predominates; and it's not the original one, either.

Here's what I say: I make mistakes all the time. All the time. But when I'm doing something that's going to be published, I do everything I can to make sure that I DON'T. I think that, if you're publishing something, you have a responsibility to get it right. Whatever it takes, you get it right. Do the research, check the facts, talk to people who are, um, a little more experienced than you are, maybe? And have someone else read over it and check it after you're done. A good copy editor is worth her weight in gold, let me tell you.

[Note: no, I do not consider this blog as being "published" in that sense, never mind the little "publish post" button. I cannot afford my own copy editor; and, having done copy editing, I don't do it for free. OK?]

Because what's happening is this: because tv "news" has become a time when hot young things joke around with each other and think of every newscast as a potential screen test, with editorializing and emoting and much waving of hands, we have no idea what's Real News--i.e., stuff that's actually happening--and what's speculation, opinion, supposition, rumor. Because "reality tv," which is about as close to reality as I am to Paris Hilton, is our new source of What the World is Really Like, we have no idea of the truth of other people's lives. Because Real journalism is hard work, with long hours and uncooperative subjects and bad food and low pay, whereas hosting a tv or radio live talk show is Fun & Sparkly! Also Sexy! we don't even pretend to have more than a handful of really good, dedicated journalists out there trying to find The Real Stories about everything from, gee, the fucking WAR to what, exactly, is going on with our--OUR, people!--economy. Oh, no--our idea of a pressing news issue is whether Obama was actually secretly born in a hospital in Kenya and if Oprah is once again losing weight or just leaning more heavily on the airbrush.

Everything is about fluff, surface, style, hotness. Nothing is about depth and substance. It's not cool to dig and work and craft something that actually MEANS something.

Botox and fake nails will get you an anchor position on the nightly news, whereas a track record of consistently nailing the stories about graft and corruption and what really goes on in your city will get you a demotion to writing text for the ad department of your local weekly.

We love fast. We love easy. We love our news--and our art, and our lives--to be quick and easy and non-demanding. My god: we've become a nation of hot glue and 20-second sound bites, instant soup and the Xyron machine.

Mea culpa.

We have become a very, very stupid people.