| The dust jacket depicts cartoonish figures of Princess Diana, Deepak Chopra, Noam Chomsky, Hillary Clinton, Pat Buchanan, and Ayatollah Khomeini, accompanied by carnival-print phrases like "Deluded Celebrities" and "Media Morons." The back cover offers a testimonial that IDIOT PROOF is a companion to Michael Moore's STUPID WHITE MEN. Whatever this book is, it decidedly does not belong with anything by Michael Moore. Furthermore, the contents of this book are rather substantially different than the expose-style cover would suggest. Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, and Francis Fukuyama, and Alan Sokal occupy far more of this book's content than Hillary Clinton and Pat Buchanan. The latter have clearly and misleadingly been pasted onto the cover to attract American buyers. Then again, how many Americans would buy this book if its cover was plastered with head shots of Diana, Tony, and Margaret surrounded by Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Noam Chomsky, Tom Friedman, and Jacques Lacan? IDIOT PROOF is an extraordinarily difficult book to categorize, in part because it feels like it was written by an ADHD sufferer. The book skips wildly from philosophy to economics to pop culture to globalization to Marxism to Islamic fundamentalism to the dot.com bubble to the sins of left-wing liberalism and the IMF to Enron. In the end, it is difficult to know who the idiots are and what their delusions are, since the only common thread seems to arise out of a specious argument that Margaret Thatcher led a revolt against the rational principles of the Age of Enlightment. So Americans can apparently blame Dame Maggie for everything from irrational exuberance to Paris Hilton, from aromatherapy to UFO sightings at Area 51. Following an opening discourse on Immanuel Kant, Chapter 1 traces the new Victorianism of Margaret Thatcher's ministry. The next chapter deals with the inflated importance of gurus from Tom Peters, Stephen Covey and Deepak Chopra to Anthony Robbins, John Gray, and Jeffrey Robbins, a subject that seems consistent with the book's title and cover depictions. The next chapter jumps to a bizarre discourse on Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, followed by a chapter on structuralism, deconstructionism and the post-modernist critics from Derrida to Lacan to Stanley Fish, wrapped up with a riff on creationism in Kansas. Chapter 5 gets seemingly back on point with an amusing discussion of popular delusions and quackery, ranging from Nostradamus to homeopathy to UFO's and the Book of Revelation. Much of the remainder of the book wanders through religious fundamentalism, the military-industrial complex, Al Gore's tobacco farm, Lady Diana worship,Thomas Friedman, the East India Company, the World Bank, Enron, Islamic fundamentalism, and finally to Pol Pot and Noam Chomsky. The wrap-up says it all -- those who reject rationalism and the Enlightenment live in darkness and threaten to take the rest of us with them. Individual chapters in IDIOT PROOF are generally interesting in themselves, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. In the end, this book lacks a strong enough connecting thread to tie together such wildly disparate topics and their odd juxtapositions. It hardly seems necessary to use 287 pages to make the point that rationalism is more rational than religious fundamentalism and New Age mumbo-jumbo, and in the end, there appears to little notion as to what to do about it. The author offers little hope, and the dust jacket lamely suggests that "we might just think a little more and believe a little less." Yeah, I guess that pretty well solves the problem, doesn't it? IDIOT PROOF is less than its cover suggests, but also more than the puffery displayed in the cover design. Buy this book for its depth of thought on some complex intellectual topics and its deft puncturing of cults, spiritualism, self-help, and a host of left-wing shibboleths. But don't buy this book as a trashing of pop culture, and definitely don't buy it as a companion piece to Michael Moore. |