Chagal4's Blog

A friend once told me that there is no such thing as stupid…which, considering the guy, was pretty much an open question and charmingly self-serving. He went on to defend himself on a dealing charge (after selling a suitcase full of weed to a couple of cops) by claiming, first of all, that he was temporarily insane because he was on acid at the time…and secondly that he should be tried by a jury of his peers…therefore…they should be on acid too…or at least have used it previously. Oddly he was almost on the right track since Harry Anslinger had generally convinced the government of the United States and several other countries, back in the sixties, that marijuana made you crazy…the insanity defense should have worked, especially with the acid argument. Alas he was but one among many of my friends and relatives (and I must count myself among their company) whose bizarre antics have kept me in stitches for over sixty years. My seventieth year is fast approaching and I’ll count myself lucky if I make it, but it has stirred a bubbling kettle of ruminations and looking back at some of the bone headed moves I’ve made I began to wonder why “stupidity” got such a bad rap. I mean, where would we be without it? There is probably no other single thing that so occupies our time as much as pointing out stupidity in others and thus demonstrating our own brilliance. You’re walking down the street, it’s a lovely day, sun shining, birds singing in the trees (assuming the trees and the birds) up ahead there’s a young man dressed in the fashion of the day…pants belted somewhere in the O’zone between the waist (what’s dat?) and the knees. He’s busy walking and doing something electronic on a small gadget in his hands…when WHAM…he walks smack into a parking meter that jumped right into the middle of the sidewalk. O.K.  you saw it coming. You’re at the airport…it’s been a long day and it’s getting longer by the minute…there’s a line from here to last month at the check in counter and you can just see from your place in line that the agent is swamped and way over her head…she’s as red as a Mexican sunset and she’s hot enough to steam people’s glasses six places back in the line. The over head signs have been announcing flight cancellations for three hours. You finally get to the counter and the guy in front of you says “Hey lady…when’s the next flight out of this dump?” H-M-M-M-M I’m guessing in about a second and a half. Then there’s my pal Bob who climbs a ladder with saw in had …rests one foot on the ladder and the other on the branch… You know the rest. Over dinner a year later you can still smile about it. These things happen a million times in a million places every day…they’re part of the human condition…and I’ve already told you about my incredible car cover …so my credentials are solid. I guess my problem is that we’ve come to overburden “stupidity” , piling on malicious baggage. Stupidity has somehow acquired the odour of evil intent…or worse…the implication of terminal inferiority. Balderdash! I think we’ve been using the term inappropriately. When our esteemed politicians and captains of industry, having arrived at high office, make pronouncements that rattle in our ears like a pocket full of loose change…our expectations of common sense and wisdom are shaken out of proportion. Seemed like a good idea to give weapons to Saddam Hussein until he started killing the wrong people…Drilling holes in the Gulf of Mexico brings the oil closer to Cleveland than that stuff that comes from Saudi Arabia…except that it’s a hole in the bottom of the sea!!! Weren’t they afraid the water would run out? Did they forget that the oil was under pressure?… and who was watching Wall Street when the money disappeared? And whose idea was it to give our money to the guys who lost our money to replace the money that they lost? Why didn’t the government just give the money to us? Stupidity? Absolutely not. These things are happenings on an entirely different quantum. Stupidity ought to be returned to its rightful owners…you and I…and our pals. There are plenty of other terms that come to mind when we see some of the grand scale catastrophes engineered by people who should know better. Sometimes they don’t know any better…or at least they say so after the fact. Corruption, criminality, greed, malfeasance, ignorance, avarice, malevolence, congenital banality, habitual illegal parking and the urge to disregard warning signs are all in a different category from stupidity. I say we should liberate stupidity…take it back…before somebody does something really bad…and blames it on stupidity. Well..yes…I suppose it’s too late. What was I thinking?

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