• by Jack Feuer , June 4, 2008

Erasmus was wrong. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is never king.

All due respect to the 15th-century Dutch priest and humanist, but in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is ridiculed, beaten insensate and impaled on a stake.

In our own dear land, where merit is measured not by deeds or even words, but by whether we wear lapel pins, unoriginality is the goal. We all know that we swim in a sea of societal sewage. We complain all the time about our celebration of superficiality and our animal-like ignorance of history. But the dirty secret none of us will admit is that we like it this way.

We don't do substance in America. Never did. Never will.

Idiocracy was a documentary.

This is particularly true of marketing, where we not only embrace unoriginality; we also belabor the bejeesus out of the obvious. This is most evident in how marketing is reported by mainstream journalists and commentators. Actually, "reporting" is misleading; it's more like a spiraling stupidity loop linked by words that sound like they ought to mean something, but don't.

Case in point: the enthusiasm for New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker's new book "Buying In," which lays out his "murketing" thesis. This is the not-anywhere-near-novel idea that sometimes your product or service gets hot on its own, and you ought to just step aside and let the magic work. This is, one presumes, related to the current obsession with--and feeble attempts to be--"authentic."

Let's see if I have it right: The most-coveted consumer groups are actively antagonistic to advertising, or at least indifferent, and so hard sell doesn't sell. You have to be sneaky instead. Well, thank God for The New York Times because I haven't heard that more than, oh, 1 or 2 million times from agency executives and clients for a decade.

The swelling excitement over Walker's work resembles, albeit far less loudly, the gushing over Gladwell's tipping point a few years ago. Let's see if I got that one right: The trick to successful corporate communications is timing. I'm flabbergasted. Really. Who could possibly have figured that out before Malcolm and his scary hair showed up?

Listen--you really ought to stop putting these general-interest journos on a pedestal. They don't know crap about your business. (Tellingly, the only critical review of the Walker book I've seen was written by Matt Creamer at Ad Age, who does know crap about your business.)

Stop acting thunderstruck every time some pinwheel at a big-name outlet writes a book that simply reiterates what you already know. It isn't helpful to you. It sure doesn't make your strategizing any better. And it pisses off the rest of us.

We don't need any more of that. What we need is an honest-to-God original idea. We need it even worse than a one-eyed man in the country of the blind needs to get his ass out of town before it ends up as icing on the stake.