Shelley Gare

One or two years ago, I attended a group job interview. We were asked to imitate a zoo animal. For five minutes, I endured stoically as around me otherwise rational adults sceeched like baboons and scratched their armpits like primates. I declined to participate - although urged by the interviewers. My excuse (that by doing nothing I was effectively imitating a sloth) fell on deaf ears. Needless to say, my intransigence won me no friends (or perhaps it was the eye-rollig when they asked me to contruct a bridge out of paddle-pop sticks) and I did not receive a call-back.
The job in question, you ask? Playschool presenter? No. Village Idiot? I'm afraid not.
It was an interview for a librarian in the Southern Hemisphere's largest public library service.
I use this anecdote as an example of the wholesale idiocy that infects the culture of the western world (particularly it seems at a corporate level) - the same idiocy that Gare disects so brilliantly in The Triumph of the Airheads.
Gare is merciless in her evisceration of Human Resources nonsense, Managerial stupidity (key performance indicators, anyone?) and the excesses of political correctness. This is a hilarious and timely disscetion of our society. Gare draws the inevitable conclusion that far from living amidst the pinnacles of human achievement, we are actually living in the end-times of creativity and intelligence.
A must read for anyone who can't sit through a night news broadcast without wanting to weep with frustration.… (plus d'informations)

I found it rather amusing that Shelley Gare quoted Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities a day or so after I read the exact same passage. And that she referenced Don Watson's Weasel Words a day or two before I got a copy of that.

I'm very glad I did read the chapter on education. The school that Mr Bear will be attending next year (Kindy already! He was just a baby a few weeks ago, I swear!) really pushes their literacy and numeracy programs. Obviously a large number of parents in the local area are about as impressed with current "educational theory" as Shelley Gare was. And I can now proudly count myself amongst their number, as I have been informed! (I dislike choosing a side in an argument until I've had a chance to find out what's happening. Call me a fence sitter...)

I found the cover of the book rather badly designed. It made it look more like a joke book, when it was really a rather serious book about serious issues. Although it did make me feel rather gloomy, because I never know what to do about these big issues - the dumbing down of education (which is very dear to my heart given my addiction to education; they practically had to prise me off the Uni campus in the end); the rise of stupid management speak and the underlying idiocy; the short-term solutions of most modern politicians, etc.

I felt I'd read quite a bit of this book before as well (apart from her cross-references to my other reading material as noted above): economic rationalism in John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards; globalisation in Naomi Klein's No Logo; modern politics in Michael Moore's Stupid White Males.

It was a book that I wanted to discuss with everyone. But I didn't find it all that funny. It was funny, but a very black sort of funny that sometimes just makes me want to kill everyone and start all over again. (Gwan, wouldn't the world be a better place if we could get rid of all the people who make us miserable...? No? Oh well, spoilsports. :)… (plus d'informations)

This book was a must-read for me ever since I heard its title, and it didn’t disappoint.

In her foreward, Shelley Gare describes our age as one “where vacuity is not just celebrated, it is poured down our throats”. She goes on to a number of illustrations in this book of the way in which “airheads” have triumphed in our society, and the consequences of this social shift.

Gare synthesises a number of disconcerting social trends rather well in this very readable book, and paints a rather disturbing (but scarily recognisable) portrait of the way our world is today. Written before the current Global Financial Crisis, but quite prescient ...

There seemed to me to be at least some overlap between this and Frank Furedi's Therapy Culture, another dissection of the world of today and its social attitudes that I very much enjoyed.… (plus d'informations)