A friend of mine says the best guide to constitutional law among titles he’s surveyed is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the U.S. Constitution. I’d prefer the 70’s era light-hearted For Beginners incarnation as a recommendation. Not just because that series has the co-op recycled paper look compared to the cautionary yellow & black, distinctly generic (re. anti- aesthetic) packaging of the current self-hating imprimatur.

I think the trendy For Utter Morons marketing attitude is a horrible acceptance of today’s sorry anti-intellectual state of affairs. The American viewer-ship has shown itself as audience, gathering, or consumer group, to BE complete idiots. Or dummies, or worse, no question. But do we need to wear the sign? Why that indignity too?

Rush Limbaugh can talk to us like we’re idiots, make jokes which we’ll laugh at like idiots, or have us applaud unknowingly at our own duping like idiots. But I’d like to draw the line at being called an idiot for the laugh.

No, I’d rather a book “for the novice” or “an introduction to” or other healthy self-depricating sobriquet. Perhaps I am also put off by the condescension. Astrophysics in Plain Words would also disqualify.

You say the “Complete Idiot” reference is just a joke, it’s meant to be funny, to be catchy, to sell books. Being an idiot myself much of the time, I don’t find it funny at all. Neither would I find amusing, Beauty for Ugly Girls, Etiquette for Poor People, or Landlording for Assholes.