THE INSTANT GENIUS:
An Indispensable Handbook for Know-It-Alls
By Tanya Slover
General Publishing Group, 142 pages, $10.95 paper
THE EXPERTS SPEAK:
The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation
By Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky
Villard, 445 pages, $15 paper
EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL:
Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups
By Robert Anton Wilson, with Miriam Joan Hill
HarperPerennial, 435 pages, $15 paper
There’s so much useless information in the world.
Starting with Robert Ripley’s modest “Believe It or Not!” cartoon drawings in 1918 and continuing through this season’s “Guinness World Records” prime-time TV show, the appetite for authoritative and semiauthoritative information has only grown in this century. And though the outlandish stories, facts and figures are the most popularized part of the industry, who doesn’t find himself struggling at times to verify, to ease that nagging doubt with a comfort blanket of some authoritative source, to be a little more certain that that recalled detail or story is true and can be proven to anyone who questions it?
I’m not claiming to be above this need to know. My wife said if there were a book club for reference books she’d join it–and so would I. Our shelves are crowded with well over 100 dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, compendiums, field guides and all the rest, and they cover popular culture, slang, language, history, myths, nature, medicine, sports and subjects as arcane as portmanteaus and as common as Warner Bros. cartoons. Charles Panati’s parades of the bizarre and David Feldman’s “Imponderables” series can be some of my favorite bedtime reading; it’s always pleasant to drift off under the illusion that I’ve learned something.
So when I began reading Tanya Slover’s “The Instant Genius: An Indispensable Handbook for Know-It-Alls,” I may have had a bit of an attitude. After all, the title invites trouble. But what I realized when I finished the book went far beyond the inadequacies of this volume; I recognized just how meaningless most information is by itself. Certainly, people can be entertained with anecdotes of Ping-Pong balls raising sunken ships, friends can be stumped by such questions as, “How much water can a ten-gallon hat hold?” (the answer: less than a gallon), and, if it is true that his sister’s cat ate Thomas Hardy’s heart before it could be interred in his birthplace, that is a sad end for anyone. But when this information is placed side by side, the lesson taught isn’t going to make anyone a genius or a know-it-all. Instead, this book leaves an emptiness behind. Most of the time I wanted to know the rest of the story.
I did learn that four words in English have no rhyming partners (“purple,” “orange,” “silver” and “month”), but since reading “Instant Genius” I’ve learned that “pint” should have been on that list as well. This is another danger prevalent in the business of information collected for mass consumption: Not only is the information incomplete, but quite often it is wrong, such as the recurring story that Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas singing group choked to death on a ham sandwich (the coroner reported she died at 33 of a heart attack in London).
“(E)xpert misinformation, disinformation, misunderstanding, miscalculation, egregious prognostication, boo-boos, and occasional just plain lies” are collected and categorized in Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky’s “The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation,” a revised edition of their 1984 Pantheon book. This one offers numerous reminders of the fallibility of experts and the stupidity, blindness and venal self-interested manipulation at times of everybody else, especially politicians. This book could stand up as a companion to “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations”; where “Bartlett’s” provides some of the best thoughts in the best words on many subjects, “The Experts Speak” gives us the weakest thoughts in often the most inept words.
If there is any point to complain about, it is the inclusion of world leaders and politicians as experts. The statements of leaders from King George III to John Adams to Abraham Lincoln to Kaiser Wilhelm to Mohandas Gandhi about domestic and international relations and warfare in their times are words spoken from varying positions of authority, but the levels of expertise involved are questionable at best, and the purposes of the statements in context are necessary to determine if these are words of wishful or fearful thinking. The misinformation that more contemporary political figures rely upon is certainly not expertise either: No American president of the time could be considered an expert on Vietnam, Spiro Agnew was not an expert on ethics in government, Ronald Reagan was never an expert on environmental concerns, and Bill Clinton has not proven to be an expert on a military presence in Bosnia. When Vice President George Bush said the invasion of Grenada in October 1983 “will be remembered as one of our finest hours,” does anyone think that even the Republicans he was addressing at a barbecue in Corpus Christi, Texas, believed him?
I wouldn’t argue against the inclusion of these quotations; they simply seem to be of a different nature from Thomas Edison’s predictions about the popularity of electric cars or Charlie Chaplin saying, “The cinema is little more than a fad.” But at a time when TV, newspapers and radio are inundated with expert-speak dissecting and analyzing the news of each day, I suppose it is fair for Cerf and Navasky to remind us that the newsmakers give those experts a confusing and often misleading trail to interpret and follow.
Of course, there are other methods for interpreting the information that confounds us, and Robert Anton Wilson (with Miriam Joan Hill) has compiled many of the ways people have chosen to do just that in “Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups.” Though the mention of cults in the title seems a little thin after reading the book, conspiracy theories and coverups abound in this guide to the history and ongoing creations and research of people who have discovered reasons to distrust and question “the official story.”
Let me say that if you have no sense of humor and are prone to paranoia, don’t buy this book! I admired the good-natured tone and amusing cross-referencing Wilson invests throughout what could be a truly depressing tome. Even with the relief this offers, this was one book about which I found myself thinking, “I would not give this to someone who really wanted it.”
As Wilson writes in the introduction, “nobody can dive very deeply into these infested waters without having at least occasional flashes of true paranoia.” However certain a person might be in rejecting speculations about aliens, androids or demons walking among us, rejecting everything in these pages is difficult. The accumulation of strange deaths; the disappearance of evidence, money or people; the intriguing fragment of a letter or document that just doesn’t fit the explanations given: These are the splinters of doubt that lodge beneath the skin, and it’s not easy to remove them–the information to make them disappear just isn’t available.
When it comes to information, it is never truly useless (though it still often feels that way). It can be overwhelming, incomplete, meaningless without context, or simply inaccurate. The most reliable experts understand that what makes them wise is acknowledging all that they do not know.
