Editors of Readers Digest - The Dumb Book: Silly Stories, Stupid People, and Mega Mistakes that Crack Us Up

A READERS DIGEST BOOK

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ISBN 978-1-62145-138-9

ISBN 978-1-62145-149-5 (eBook)

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Illustrations: H. Caldwell Tanner

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Dumb has always been with us.

But these daysour daysare dumb in ways we never imagined, at levels we never dreamed possible.

Once upon a time, you could get up, have breakfast, go to work, come home, have dinner and go to bed, and experience no dumb that didnt happen to you personally.

Maybe youd hear a dumb tale or two around the water cooler or see something silly on the evening news. But for the most part, dumb kept its distance. If you wanted some, you had to provide it for yourself or get it from your friends and neighborsjust as you once had to haul your own water and grow your own food.

But today, you can get more dumb in between your first two cups of coffee than your grandparents saw in a lifetime.

You can get it from every corner of the globe, any minute of the day. You dont even need to get out of bed, much less talk to another human being. All you need is a cell phone and an Internet connection to meet:

The woman who called 911 because her local McDonalds was out of McNuggets.

The school officials who removed the dictionary from classrooms because of offensive material.

The drunk who fell onto the New York City subway tracks and won a $2.3 million settlement.

The Facebooker who cheerfully reminded her friends: There is no i in happyness!

Experts agree: the combination of multibillion-dollar information age technology and the publics apparently insatiable appetite for stupid have brought us into what appears to be a Golden Age of Dumb. Dumb can soar across oceans, rise above mountains, and fly into outer space and back again. Unconstrained by national borders, unbound by language, dumb needs no passport and frequently no translator. On the wings of the Internet, fueled by cell phone cameras and social networking sites, dumb has gone global. It is rapidly replacing love as the international language.

It is a moment unmatched in human historya feast of foolishness our ancestors could only dream of.

Dumb wasnt always so easy to find. Until very recently, it was carefully shrouded in secrecy and shame. People who did dumb things didnt tell anyone. They took great pains to deny dumbs existence.

We have some nuggets of dumb from the past, of course. We know that:

In ancient times, when the legendary general Hannibal lead his army across the Alps to invade Rome, he triggered a massive avalanche by angrily stabbing a snowdrift with his cane. Thousands of soldiers and animals were swept away, and it took his army four days to dig itself out.

Another military legend, General George Custer, had the option of bringing a battery of rapid-fire guns with him to the ill-fated Battle of Little Bighorn. He left them behind, thinking they would slow him down. Custer and his men ended up being cut to ribbons by Sioux warriors.

In 1876, the Western Union telegraph company had a chance to buy the patent for the telephone from Alexander Graham Bell for $100,000and passed. While it is a very interesting novelty, said Western Unions William Orton, it has no commercial possibilities.

In 1962, Decca Records had a chance to sign an up-and-coming pop act, but executive Dick Rowe turned them down. We dont like your boys sound. Rowe told their manager. Groups with guitars particularly are on their way out.

Proven tales like these are the exception, not the rule. For centuries, most real examples of actual human stupidity have been confined to the privacy of our homes and work places.

To fill the void, humans were forced to produce countless legends of imaginary dumb and circulate them by word of mouthlike the story about the old woman who killed her dog by trying to dry it in the microwave, or the kid who blew up his stomach by mixing Pop Rocks candy and soda.

But in the Internet age, that kind of myth-making is no longer necessary. Huge troves of real, verifiable dumb are now available to anyone and everyone. Who needs legends when we have:

A man who mistakenly splashes himself with gasolineand then lights up the last cigarette hed ever smoke.

A lawyer who falls to his death through a plate glass window while demonstrating the safety of plate glass windows.

A motorcyclist taking part in a ride to protest helmet laws who flips his bike and dies because he wasnt wearing a helmet. He would have wanted it that way, said his brother.

Dumb bosses, dumb workers, dumb celebrities, dumb lawyers, dumb inventors, dumb criminals, dumb bureaucrats, dumb politiciansno more do they dumb in private. Their mistakes can be instantly exposed for all to see by an army of people filming, e-mailing, Facebooking and tweeting about them. Countless websites publish their stories. Countless readers share these tales with their friends and family. We have ever-new ways to see dumb, to be dumb, and to share dumb. Dumb can come at us faster, harder, and in greater volume than ever.

This should be, oddly enough, good news.

Dumb, scientists know, is a critical natural resource, essential to the development and preservation of the species. We depend on dumb. There is no smart without it.

Think about it: somewhere in the murky past is a moment where one caveman saw his hungry neighbor rashly pop a strange toadstool into his mouth. Upon observing his neighbors subsequent convulsions and painful end, this ancestor concluded that such toadstools would be best left alone.

That means his unfortunate friend did not die dumb in vain. The late lamented helped bring smarts to countless humans who learned from his example and stayed away from the killer mushrooms. Dumb is useful because it teaches us what not to do.

So its natural that were fascinated with dumb. We dont just like it. We need it. Dumb is and has always been essential to the survival of the human race. And thus we find it irresistible. When we see it, we want to share it, and we generally cannot be stopped from doing so.

Humans cant get enough dumb.

And dumb couldnt be happier about it.

Dumb, it turns out, is not a finite resource like oil and gas. Nor is it just a renewable resource like solar or wind power. Dumb is actually a living, self-replicating thing that feeds on attention and grows like kudzu.

All it takes is one video of a kid lighting his shoes on fire by riding a burning skateboard to send thousandsif not millionsof young people worldwide out into the streets armed with matches, lighter fluid, and cell-phone cameras.

So dumb is no longer isolated in fragments. Instead, every available molecule of dumb can now be released into the atmosphere to form powerful new superstructures of stupid.