Untrivial Pursuits

Number of times McDonald is mentioned in The Harper's Index Book: 2

Burger King: 0

Number of statistics taken from The Washington Post: 2

Number of statistics taken from John Love's McDonald's: Behind the Arches: 2

Percentage of pages containing complete sentences : 5

Percentage of pages which list the table of contents: 3

Number of entries in The Harper's Index Book: 1159

Number of entries which answer questions wars have been fought over: 0

The Harper's Index Book

By the Editors of Harper's Magazine

Henry Holt; 125 pp.; $6.95 pbk.

It started three years ago, when the editors of Harper's Magazine came up with a bright idea: to tell the story of modernity through its mundanity. Thus was born the Harper's Index, a monthly potpourri of pop trivia gleaned from the chroniclers and quantifiers of all things great and small. The result was a corps of diehards who didn't know they were interested in such micro-bytes of information as the percentage of Icelanders who believe in elves (5) or the diameter of the real-life "wheel of fortune" (8 feet, 6 inches).

The Index, with its acontextual presentation of pre-cooked information represents the ultimate reduction ad absurdum of fast-food culture. But its not a bland offering, as the biases of the editors are clear. When the hyper-trivial is left aside, the statistics in the Index take potent swipes at the American zeitgeist and all its hypocricy and self-indulgence.

The statistics attack American standards--sometimes literally, such as when it tells us of the 40 percent of Iowans who have a hard time singing "The Star-Spangled Banner. The Index, in fact, is unsparing in its depiction of the folkways of the Midwest. Nebraska, it turns out, has 376 one-room school houses. Half of first-time brides in Kentucky are teenagers. Turning its sights on the nation as a whole, the Index informs that every year 6312 postmen are bitten by dogs and that American's favorite meal is steak and potatoes.

Then there are the funny "idea" statistics. There are 245 one-liners in an average Henny Youngman monologue. (0.4 percent of which involve the taking of his wife.) At today's rates, George Bernard Shaw ran up a $50,000 postal bill in his lifetime. Chicago's libraries have 7500 copies of Catcher in the Rye outstanding.

All of this is innocuous enough. Nevertheless, there is a grander message lurking beneath this madness--and it's a disturbing one. The picture of America that emerges Seurat-like from the Index is one of a nation suffering from what only can be termed malaise.

THE BOOK gives credence to the major fears of Harper's upscale, overeducated readership. Namely, the military-industrial complex, pollution, cultural illiteracy, alienation and anomie are undermining America's pre-eminence and quality of life. The odd combination of Cassandra-like despair and Letterman-esque snidery at the folly of it all surely must be what accounts for the Index's following.

So we are told about the Defense Department. All about it, from the value of items it misplaces in a year ($1,013,697,000) to it's yearly phone bill ($84,800,000)...to the number of cockroaches (2,000,000) estimated to be roaming around the Pentagon. Making their own contribution to the old debate over guns versus butter, the editors inform that it costs 263 pounds of butter for an M-16 rifle. Statistic has become metaphor.

And then we return to the heartland. Fifty-seven percent of all Iowans think front-porch swings "should be brought back." Asked who they would like to return as should they be brought back in another life, 64 percent said they wouldn't mind coming back as themselves. (The four Boisians who voted for Mr. Potato Head for mayor perhaps should reconsider.)

What is creepy about reading the Index is the sense it conveys that modern society is crumbling. How else can you make sense of recurring statistics concerning how our lives are being contaminated, from the increase in the percentage of U.S. women between the ages of 20 and 24 in who are infertile today (11) as opposed to 1965 (4); the doubling of the number of recognized mental disorders between 1952 and 1987; and the pounds of chemical additives an average American eats in a year (9).

Occasionally the two obsessions of the editors meet--27 percent of Iowans, we learn, drink water with traces of pesticides. They live in a wasteland and their bodies are being turned into landfills.

Feelings of suspicion and cynicism linger long after the many statistics are forgotten. Ironically, the editors seem to lament the lack of meaningful political debate in America, yet rely on mere numbers to make their points. Stalin once bragged that "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic." What does that make the 1159 statistics in the Harper's Index? The stuff of fun conversation, maybe, but also cause for alarm.