Something we don’t really pay conscious attention to is that our knowledge of the outside world isn’t actually a contiguous mass. Nobody learns an entire subject in one sit-down, and in the case of the world what we know is a patchwork of often-conflicting information garnered from teachers, books, the Discovery Channel, the evening newscast, magazines, newspapers, pop culture, and firsthand accounts from relatives who went abroad, often to fight in wars.
Atlases are often neutral entities, which are generally minimal on text and heavy on maps, especially the home-budget kind. Atlases reveal without explaining, show without telling. And so when we actually see the world in print, with its cities picked out with dots and its terrain revealed in colors, we end up wrapping the real world in our patchwork thought-quilt of what we think it is. And, against all odds, people have actually captured and refined this feeling in a parody atlas.
“Our Dumb World” is a gloriously artful blend of utility and misappropriated effort, like a hatchback with a machine gun turret. The atlas (allegedly the 73rd edition) is broken down into sections (Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, etc.) and the region’s countries are listed therein. Then the fun begins.
Some nations, of course, lend themselves naturally to the American popular consciousness (“Known for their incredible stealth, exceptional swiftness, and uncanny ability to blend in with any environment, the people of Vietnam have you completely surrounded. Whatever you do know, don’t look up.”) However, for my money, what makes this atlas really sing is the genial misrepresentation of the hundred-plus countries the average American knows next to nothing about.
What do you know about, say, Latvia? Even if you have taken a geography course, your knowledge probably stops at its location, which is in northeastern Europe, and that it was once part of the USSR. But with “Our Dumb World” Latvia veritably springs to life! No longer just a place on a map, “Latvia is home to Europe’s most breathtaking swamps, picturesque marshes, and an endless horizon that glimmers with several different shades of runoff.”
Each blurb is accompanied by a map of the country in question, with geographical highlights pertaining to the map’s version of the truth. Jamaica, for instance, features such points of interest as “Bongwater Bay,” “Reef Madness,” and “Man trying to light joint by rubbing two joints together.”
I think the charm of “Our Dumb World” comes from an unfulfilled need we have for surrealism in maps. The world is in a big, big place, and when the Europeans began trying to map it all they were undertaking a monumental task – something all too easy to forget in the age of jetliners and Google Earth. Early maps tended to feature a value of accuracy that decreased proportionately as the place in question got father and farther away from the place where the mapmaker lived.
There lives on in our minds a part of us that needs our maps to say “Here There Be Dragons” – a part of us that wants there to be some mystery and magic left in the world. There is something about us that wants to see a book full of countries whose described attributes are wildly abstracted renditions of two or three real facts. And so, for those of us who really want Romania to be populated by vampires, for Argentina to be populated by aging Nazis, and for North Dakota to be populated by no one at all, there is “Our Dumb World.”