FAULT - Maphead - page 26

night's NBC interview. No matter which channel Americans were tuned to, * they were see-
ing David Helgren.
After showing the clip in which the tanned himbo confessed to not knowing where Ch-
icago was, the Today show's Bryant Gumbel remarked to the camera, “Well, you know,
some folks down there call that place 'Suntan U.'”
Ouch. By the time Helgren returned home to Miami, the residents had the torches and
pitchforks ready. His wife fielded anonymous threatening phone calls to their home num-
ber. “My daughter is not a dummy!” one Hurricane mom blustered. “I'm going to have
you fired!” The university president called the incident “very unfortunate,” and a group of
law students threatened to sue Helgren, the university, and even Bryant Gumbel for all the
loss of future income they'd undoubtedly suffer. (“Why didn't you make partner last year,
Bob?” “Oh, you know, the usual. Bryant Gumbel.”) The campus public relations staff had
been working that year to rebrand Miami, long sensitive to its reputation as a party school,
as“aglobaluniversityinaglobalcity,”sothemediacircuscameattheworstpossibletime.
One miffed publicist even compared l'affaire Helgren to the famous case a decade earlier
in which a Miami researcher had kidnapped a young woman at gunpoint, then buried her
in a fiberglass box in rural Georgia.
“Iwasintheworstshitever,fromtheinstitutionandthecity,”Helgrentellsme.It'sbeen
twenty-five years, but he still looks completely bewildered as he describes his unwitting
career suicide, the result of a few geographically inept undergrads and one slow news day.
“At any other campus, this wouldn't have been an issue. That's the weirdness of Miami.
It's essentially a freak show in American culture.”
Though Helgren had been awarded a quarter of a million dollars in grants for his re-
search—“morethananyonehadevergotinthewholeplace,”hesays—andwasupforpro-
motion, he learned the following year that he'd be out of a job in May. A colleague who
had stood up for him in the media, Jim Curtis, was dismissed a month later. The university
deniedthatthemap-illiteracykerfufflehadanythingtodowiththefirings.Asaconsolation
prize, at least the Helgren story got the National Enquirer to run a nice, serious piece on
geographic illiteracy. It appeared right between an article on a Turkish woman whose left
handweighedfortypoundsandaninterviewwithanexpertwhoclaimed that20percentof
America's dogs and cats are space aliens.
David Helgren wasn't the first to discover, of course, that lots of people are pretty lousy
at geography. In fact, geographical ignorance is such an engrained part of our culture that
it's become an easy bit of comedy shorthand for ditziness, the same way you might show a
character wearing a barrel with suspenders to represent poverty. Marilyn Monroe, in Gen-
tlemen Prefer Blondes, insisted that she wanted to visit “Europe, France”; fifty years later,
Sacha Baron Cohen deployed the exact same joke on Da Ali G Show, annoying his United
Nations tour guide by complaining about the fact that Africa isn't a U.N. member. Joey on