Dumb and dumber.

Does not knowing or remembering in which month Columbus Day (October) falls mark you as dumber than a 5th grader? Or, the first US President to be impeached (Andrew Jackson), for that matter? Or, the name of the ship on which the Pilgrims sailed from Southhampton in England to Plymouth, Massachusetts in the US (Mayflower), if it comes to that? http://tinyurl.com/64aqkg. Certainly not, in my humble opinion. All it means most likely is you're not up to scratch on trivia. In BAD or The Dumbing of America (Simon & Schuster-Touchstone, New York, 1991), Paul Fussell writes about a different and special strain of dumb: anything "phony, clumsy, witless. untalented, vacant, or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright, or fascinating" (p.13). He cites Lawrence Welk and George Bush as examples of BAD at the low and high end respectively. Advertising hype is one of the main targets of Fussell's ire. Another of his targets, viz., the Bride's Wishlist which "Miss Manners" (Judith Martin-Perlman), an arbiter of good form and etiquette via her syndicated advice column, thoroughly disapproved of in 1990 or thereabouts as being "in appalling taste" has become an accepted form of social behaviour thanks to the changing times and the influence of the Internet. http://tinyurl.com/68uvta. Some of the windmills in the US mainstream Fussell tilts at are the higher education focusing on athletics at the expense of academics, the pretentious sham of gourmet restaurants, the low IQ of blockbuster movies, the incoherent babble of modern language comprising euphemisms, corporate jargon and overly complex signs and so forth. (Please also see http://tinyurl.com/47jmjl.) This debunker of most things modern and post-modern doesn't approve of – surprise, surprise! – Wagner, Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, all reggae music, Beethoven and Brahms as also religious fundamentalism and materialism. What's wrong with contemporary culture? Fussell's answer would be, I reckon, the ubiquity of mindless pop culture, sports and advertising and the all-pervading anti-intellectual climate. Makes good sense, if you ask me. By the way, I find BAD making inroads into Middle India in a big way.

Dan Brown’s ‘truth’.

As a child, Dan Brown (born in 1964 – which puts him bang in the so-called Conscious Revolution era, a time of spiritual awakening in American history, demographically speaking – Viet Nam protests, feminism, ecology, a rebellious counterculture, that sort of stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Revolution) had what might be called a ‘proper’ Christian upbringing. He used to attend Sunday school and summer camps run by the Church. He also used to sing in the Church choir. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Brown. Yet he grew up to write the bestselling novels, The Da Vinci Code (1993) and Angels & Demons (2000). Fiction though they claim to be what they’re saying strikes an echoing chord in the mind of anyone who knows his history. I think they’re popular not because they’re racy thrillers but because they offer a premise that seems reasonably plausible. The fundamentalists will do anything to keep their monopoly of knowing and dispensing truth. Kill, torture, maim, character-assassinate, lie, twist facts… you name it. All of which reminds me of what Aldous Huxley wrote in Ape & Essence:

Church and State.
Greed and hate.
Two baboon persons
In one supreme gorilla.

Also, of the incidence earlier in the same novel where there are two groups of apes facing each other with a different flag waving behind each one. Each group of apes has an Albert Einstein, on his hands and knees, on a leash. Each of these Einsteins is facing the other and speaking of how terrible their exploitation is. The scene ends with the announcement of the death of modern science by suicide.