Byline: D. PARVAZ P-I reporter
I have it on good authority that we're becoming dumber and dumberer.
Nope, I haven't conducted any scientific studies, and I'm not about to do any either. .
I'm just going by the people who are hired by major companies to deal with their customers. Some sales clerks and customer service reps are brilliant. But the standard is slipping at an alarming rate, in accordance with everything else in our culture.
Ladies and gentlemen, witness the Paris Hiltonization of American pop culture. There shouldn't be any shame in not knowing something - hence the importance of Google and surrounding oneself with wicked smart people (they know things). But we seem to be shifting toward a willful ignorance, a state in which it's cool to say that you don't watch the news or read the paper or follow politics. (Notice I said cool, not hip. Hip people pretend they're too good to even know who the celebutante is.)
It's all about fast, pointless celebrity, with icons who say things so alarmingly stupid it's hard to believe their gene pools have survived quite this long: Paris thinks working is for poor people; Jessica Simpson was certain buffalo wings come from winged buffaloes and Lindsay Lohan sweetly declared that she'd like to set up orphanages in Japan (a country with one of the lowest birthrates in the world probably doesn't need it, Li-Lo).
People working in the retail seem to reflect this trend in a big way (being the people we interact with the most outside our immediate circles, they're sort of a frontline indicator). They seem to be less likely to be able to tell the difference between you-know-what and shinola.
For example, looking for Jeffrey Frank's "The Columnist" in two major bookstores in town, I had to spell "columnist" for staffers. One was spelling it "culomist" and kept telling me that the title wasn't showing up in the store's database. In retrospect, the girl must have been unclear about the subject of the book - culo (which rhymes with J-Lo) is Spanish slang for, well, the butt, as chanted by rappers Pitbull and Lil' Jon's 2004 summer gem, "Culo."
In the other store, I actually had to define the meaning of columnist for the confused staffer (perhaps she would have had less trouble with a book titled "The Blogger").
I almost wept. Isn't this supposed to be the most literate city in the country? What the hell are we reading? Is there anything that can counter the damage of watching too many hours of "Laguna Beach?"
When looking for a gift for a friend living in India, I asked the clerk at a major skin/hair care store if the company had shops in New Delhi or Bombay. I may as well have been asking her if they had a branch on the moons of Jupiter because she had no idea where those cities are. I could tell she was thinking that they might be somewhere near Nebraska.
"Um, they're in India," I added hoping she could at least bust out a list of their overseas stores.
"I don't know. Maybe you could check on the Internet?" she offered, her mouth hanging open at the end of that question/statement/whatever. If she had a lazy eye and some sort of small dog or kinkajou under one arm, she could have passed for Paris in a pinch.
Oh, well, what can you do?
I was filled with dread when I saw a new federal charge on my cell phone bill. It wasn't much and I knew talking to my carrier about it would be frustrating. Yet, I went ahead and called my cell phone company. Here, I should add that they have the friendliest, most polite people manning those phones. Sadly, they can't seem to tell the difference between a state tax and a federal tax. The fella on the other end of the line kept trying to tell me that Washington state's sales tax had increased. "Believe me, it hasn't. Plus the bill says this is a federal tax, so "
First he said something I swear sounded like, "Federline?" as in, Britney Spears HusBoy, Kevin. But he continued.
"You need to call Washington to find out," offered the rep. For a moment I thought he meant D.C., but no, he meant state. To him federal (or Federline) was just another word for state, kind of like book learnin' was another term for waste of time.
"Call the state office and they'll tell you what it is."
"But it's federal. Ugh. Nevermind."
Another clerk at a clothing store tried to convince me that they didn't skin the rabbits for the fur on the jacket she was trying to sell me.
"We just shave them," she said. Wow.
Wonder how she thought they'd turn a bag of shaved rabbit hair into that tidy little trim on a jacket? I almost said, "And do you keep them at a spa and feed them an organic diet so that their hairs grow back before you shave them again?" Instead, I shook my head as she repeated the idiotic claim that she clearly believed, despite being able to feel the rabbit's skin beneath the fur. "I really don't care. I'm not buying that jacket."
"OK, but we shave the rabbits and "
I stared at her head momentarily for signs of major blunt-force trauma (a dent, a bump, anything, really), and walked away with the conclusion that unless this stupidity stops being in vogue, we're doomed.
P-I reporter D. Parvaz can be reached at 206-448-8095 or dparvaz@seattlepi.com.
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