The Persistence of Human Stupidity-From the Swamp Creature to Bin Laden & Bush II

Rating:
Summary: Vanity work that needs extensive editing
Review: This is a vanity work, pure and simple. Lulu.com, the publisher of the book is a publisher of vanity works. The book does not even indicate a copyright or publication date.

David Campbell, the author may have something to say, but he does not say it very well. In publishing this vanity work, the author should have paid someone with even moderate skills in editing, say a college freshman English student, to correct all the book's errors, much less to rewrite this nearly incomprehensible mess.

Though the author claims to be a PhD college professor (Professor-California University of Pennsylvania), there is little evidence of a college education in his writing.

Even the title is misleading, obviously designed solely to catch a prospective buyer's eye; the book has a scant two pages, near the end, about G.W. Bush and bin Laden, for both of whom the author uses his favorite pejorative: "true believer." The author seems not to know that G.W. Bush is NOT George Bush II.

The book is full of incoherent sentences, dangling participles, lack of subject-verb agreement, bad punctuation, misspelled words and incorrect homonyms. For instance: the author uses "alter boys" instead of altar boys; "Mac Beth" vice Macbeth; your instead of you're; "they're" vice their; "teaming shores" vice teeming shores [from the Lazarus poem]; "naval" instead of navel [our belly button]; "sex pot" vice sexpot; "pass-time" instead of pastime; "could care less" for "couldn't care less"; "them selves" for themselves; "Grahm" for [Martha] Graham; and I could go on and on.

Most egregious: Campbell dedicates his book to Carl Sagan, then goes on, here and there throughout the book to misspell even Sagan's name as "Sagon."

The basic thrust of the author's ideas seems to be:

He himself belongs to the ten percent of the country's intelligentsia. Most everyone else is an "idiot." Idiot, idiocy, swamp creature, phony, parasite, etc. are his favorite words.

Republicans are idiots. Nearly all teachers, at all levels, other than him, are parasites and idiots.

Athletes, particularly football players, are over-sexed idiots. Cheerleaders are oversexed idiots who just want to screw the football players.

In short, what Campbell says are mostly his opinions, supported by nearly no supporting evidence. His ramblings appear to be mostly the vitriol of a "geezer" who hates noisy young people and believes that anyone who doesn't like his, Campbell's, choice of TV channels (Discovery), music (Beethoven, mostly) and art (mostly Van Gogh) are "idiots" who have little if any taste. He even implies that he himself was born with "taste." Well, it certainly does not show in this vanity book.

Hobart Crusenberry, PhD, DD
Rancho Palos Verdes, CA