Tuesday, July 23, 2013

STUPIDITY


If you add up the number of practitioners of the seven cardinal (or, in lay terms, deadly) sins, I doubt if the number will equal that of those guilty of stupidity. Ergo: Shouldn’t stupidity make it as a deadly, conceivably the deadliest, sin?

I can say this with some confidence, having evinced some form of stupidity at all stages of my life, the memory of which haunts me despite all attempts at expiation. To be sure one of the problems with stupidity is that it often masquerades as something lesser, like, say, laziness, as in the following example.

Back in my graduate student days I was very friendly with a fellow graduate student in Comparative Literature, the brilliant future academic, Claudio Guillen. Handsome, witty and wise, he was also the son of Jorge Guillen, one of the greatest Spanish poets. Anyway, one day Claudio asked me whether I had ever made love to a Spanish girl. These young women, he said, offer up to you their breasts on a silver platter.

Now you’d think that with such a potent incentive, I’d have embraced the nearest Hispanic girl, even a mere Latino, even if she were no Penelope Cruz or Dolores del Rio. But I didn’t, and haven’t to this day. Is that sloth or stupidity? I rather think the latter, considering that I would have settled for a mere china platter.

Stupidity! Today you see it all around you. Sometimes it is relatively harmless, such as my getting on the wrong subway train or forgetting to fully turn off the bathroom tap. And, of course, one must not confuse the incidental stupidities of an intelligent person, or even of a mere intellectual, with those of a permanent, thoroughgoing stupid individual. Which reminds me that it is a bit stupid of the English language not to possess a single-word noun for a stupid person, such as German has in Dummkopf, or Russian in durak. Granted, we have such supposed substitutes as moron, cretin or idiot, but these are really unwarranted insults to people genuinely afflicted with those ailments.

In any case, the stupidities of intelligent people, though by no means inconsiderable, are no competition for those of the born stupid, which can be colossal, stupendous, tragic. Take for instance the murderous stupidity of some who own guns, even though they shouldn’t and wouldn’t if our laws were smarter. These fellows (we read about them daily) get into arguments they cannot win except by shooting the other chap dead. There follows equally deadly vengeance.

Additionally, there is the even greater stupidity that they often shoot, through misidentification, the wrong person, a mere innocent bystander. Or worse yet, because they are not only stupid but also poor shots, they kill a nearby four-year-old girl, or some poor wretch sitting too near his or her window.

That is the gun-toting stupidity. Now take the religious stupidity, which manifests itself as some sort of fanaticism. Hereabouts it often takes the Tea Party, born-again Christian form, whereby one bombs a clinic where abortions are legally performed.

Farther east, it produces such things as Muslim fanatics, who shoot little girls merely because they attend school. Or suicide bombers, who think they will be rewarded in heaven by seventy-odd virgins administering oral sex. This is particularly stupid for several reasons.

In the first place, girls good at blowjobs usually don’t go to Heaven. But girls who make it to Heaven for not practicing oral sex, what earthly, or rather unearthly, good are they? Or if they are, after all, adept at it and in Heaven, must there not be bitter competition between those chosen and those bypassed by the dead bombers? Or, if all must get their turn, how can one dead male satisfy all seventy plus without his being worn to a frazzle and doubly dead?

One of my readers noted another problem. If I converted to Islam and turned suicide bomber, and thus went to Heaven, how would I put up with those fellationist Arab virgins, all of whom would have Barbra Streisand noses? It is, as the King of Siam was apparently given to remarking, a puzzlement.

Another major form of stupidity is stealing masterpieces of painting from museums. Never mind the unremarkable stupidity of the museums; what about the monumental stupidity of the thieves? How can you possibly sell a master painting readily recognized as stolen from a museum? Can you count on some Oriental potentate to be dumb enough to buy something he’ll have to hide from both others and perhaps even himself? And even if such a millionaire nincompoop exists, how does the thief, from the other end of the world, find and gain access to him?

Apropos hiding, this can beget epochal stupidity. Take the recent case of a dumb Romanian who, with some native Dutch help, lifted seven masterpieces from the Rotterdam museum. He left this sevenfold deadly sin in a plastic bag with his mother in their native Romanian village well behind God’s back. The brilliant woman figured out that if the masterpieces were not found, there would be no evidence. And her son, who indeed was found, would have to be released from his incarceration.

So she hid the plastic bag in ever more ingenious places, culminating in a well-covered hole she dug in her garden. But even this did not seem safe enough, so she dug up the bag and carefully burned it to a crisp in her oven. Or so, perhaps mendaciously, she claims. Now any number of experts have scrutinized those ashes, and though there is no incontrovertible evidence, what they found is consistent with burnt canvas.

It might help if stupid persons recognized their own stupidity, and so took certain precautions, refrained from some rash deeds. But anyone who recognizes his stupidity is ipso facto no longer stupid, may even justly pass for a person of rare intelligence. If, on the contrary, such abstention were a common phenomenon, the people mouthing off on television would instead shut up and so get booted off, thus causing millions of stupid TV addicts to think twice—or even just once—before turning on the idiot box. (Again, my apologies to bona fide idiots.)

Many stupidities are harmful, but, I repeat, there are also harmless ones that prove soothing to their practitioners. Thus William Buckley, Jr., definitely a very smart person, wrote that he couldn’t stand remaining alive if he didn’t believe he would be reunited with his beloved predeceased spouse in Heaven. There are, granted, those cynics who believe that he would end up in the other place, but such determinations are not my point. Similarly, Nancy Reagan firmly believed that she would rejoin her Ronald in Paradise. If I could trust such distinguished believers, I would also believe in those seventy-odd Muslim virgins and their alleged ministrations.

But enough of this and back to my initial query: Why isn’t stupidity one of the deadly sins? Presumably because unlike, say, lust, sloth or greed, it is involuntary and uncontrollable. One is born with it and willy-nilly remains faithful to it. As the German proverb has it: Born stupid and void of any added learning. Bloed geboren, nichts dazugelernt.

Yet are those officially recognized deadly sins any easier to control? Does the lecher want to be a lecher, does the lazybones choose his sloth, is the miser a clandestine philanthropist? No to all.  How, when and wherefrom those compulsions came, they became destiny, just like stupidity.

Besides, intelligence and stupidity can cohabit in the same mind. Take the contestants in the TV show “Jeopardy.” They astound by instantly having the correct answers to the most diabolically contrived questions, often of the most esoteric, trivial sort. But then they will flub or be dumbfounded by the seemingly most obvious ones that anyone could answer.

What are these contestants then? Idiot savants? Perhaps. Or just smart people with certain ineluctable stupidities.




8 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    1. We lack an English word for "schadenfreude"---
      A sentiment I feel when I get annoyed-a---

      Also, Persian women can be very lovely---
      If they wear no chador and their veil uncover-ly---

      Speaking of love being stupid and an illusion,
      Here's a poem by Maura Stanton that clarifies confusion:

      The Veiled Lady

      In the 19th Century, clever mediums
      Would rap a table, making the dead speak.
      Ghostly hands would hover in the air,
      Heads would appear, Caesar, Napoleon.
      Sometimes the whole immaterial body
      Of someone’s beloved, dead daughter or sister
      Glided through a room allowing swords
      To pass though it. Once a husband rose
      And tried to caress what was never there,
      A veiled lady he thought was his wife,
      While others in the room almost fainted
      To see him step right through her crinoline.
      D.D. Home could levitate out windows
      And float above a busy London street.
      Imagine sitting on the horsehair sofa
      Almost hysterical, watching that miracle…
      But it was done with thick plate glass and lights,
      A conjurer’s trick, just like the accordion
      Played by a ghost in front of Robert Browning
      Who shuddered when a spirit hand reached out
      And put a wreath of flowers on Elizabeth
      Though afterwards he called it sham, imposture.
      But that’s what I am, that’s what we all are
      To one another, a trick of light and glass
      Projected before an audience of dupes.
      Don’t you see I’m only an illusion?
      You look aghast. You think I’m cynical
      But when you touch me in the dark at night
      You touch biology, twitchings and snores,
      Wetness, jerking muscles. Wild images
      Flicker across my convoluted brain
      As it constructs a person out of dreams.
      That woman you say you love doesn’t exist.
      Look at the way our faces have appeared
      On the black glass of the picture window
      Now that it’s evening, and the lights are on.
      There she is, standing beside you, smiling.
      Go to her. Embrace her if you can.


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    2. Noochinator, your rhyming schtick has worn thin. Suppose you could hang up the verse for a spell? (Predicting he will respond in verse...)

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    3. David Brand, here's another pan I got at the poetry website Scarriet:

      http://scarriet.wordpress.com/

      "One of the cruelest forms of bullying is to answer in rhyme, and to mock genuine emotion by mimicking it. Playgrounds are full of such mindless abuse, to the detriment of sensitive children — and the real tragedy is that some of those hurt children grow up to mimic their tormentors in turn, and don’t even know what they’re doing.

      "You yourself have no voice that I’ve ever heard but mockery, and no repertoire but what you know by rote.

      "And of course you’ve found the perfect playground in Scarriet — and as long as you don’t know where you are you won’t be lonely.

      "Certainly women, old men, and poets won’t ever come in, but you won’t notice that either.

      "Just as you didn’t notice I was leaving along with everybody else..."

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  2. Stupidity is invaluable because without stupidity, there would be no art. If no one acted stupidly in the works of Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Sophocles, Neil Simon, Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, Renoir, Dostoyevsky, Kurosawa, Altman, Adam Sandler, and etc, there would be no comedies and tragedies. Imagine if every fictional character acted wise, temperate, moderate, and smart. It would be one dull world.

    Also, stupidity is useful for social order. If everyone was smart, he would think he knows everything and cling to his own views over those of others. No one would follow anyone. But because most people are stupid, they can be hoodwinked into following the leader, the order, the cause, and etc. If the leader or cause is evil, that means trouble, as with Hitler, Mao, or Trotsky. But if the social order is bearable, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have lots of stupid people who just go along without ever thinking about stuff on their own. It's like dumb sheep are easier to control than headstrong and intelligent cats. Japan is a orderly society because most people just stupidly follow along.

    "I rather think the latter, considering that I would have settled for a mere china platter."

    That sounds good but make sure it's not Chinese breasts since no such thing exist.

    "Which reminds me that it is a bit stupid of the English language not to possess a single-word noun for a stupid person, such as German has in Dummkopf, or Russian in durak."

    There is: dumbfuc*, dumbass, stupidass, shithead, dipshit, knucklehead, etc. I'm surprised a man as verbally erudite as Simon is ignorant of such words. He must be an ignoramus.

    "Take for instance the murderous stupidity of some who own guns, even though they shouldn’t and wouldn’t if our laws were smarter."

    But if George Zimmerman didn't have a gun, Obama's son Trayvon would have knocked all his teeth out and cracked his skull.
    And it's too bad this 85 yr old grannie didn't have a gun to fend off another one of Obama's sons:

    http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/12/10/nypd-suspect-attacked-robbed-85-year-old-woman-in-elevator/

    "Tea Party, born-again Christian form, whereby one bombs a clinic where abortions are legally performed."

    I'm pro-abortion--if only to reduce the number of dumb women having kids--, but when was the last time some anti-abortion person blew up an abortion clinic?

    "Farther east, it produces such things as Muslim fanatics, who shoot little girls merely because they attend school. Or suicide bombers, who think they will be rewarded in heaven by seventy-odd virgins administering oral sex. This is particularly stupid for several reasons."

    But if US didn't pursue a stupid policy of fighting all these Wars for Israel, maybe those suicide bombers would not so crazy about banging virgins. And if Zionists hadn't ethnically cleansed Palestinians and continue to force them to live in ghetto conditions, maybe Palestinians wouldn't have resorted to suicide bombing. After all, many Palestinian suicide bombers have been women. Unless they're lesbian or there are 77 virgin studs waiting for them, I highly doubt if those women sacrificed their lives for sexual reasons.

    "How can you possibly sell a master painting readily recognized as stolen from a museum?"

    You can hold it for ransom and sell it back to the museum. That's what child kidnappers do, like in Kurosawa's High and Low.

    "Thus William Buckley, Jr., definitely a very smart person, wrote that he couldn’t stand remaining alive if he didn’t believe he would be reunited with his beloved predeceased spouse in Heaven."

    Well... love itself is stupid if you think about it. After all, what is beauty? it's a tangle of flesh, hair, calcium(teeth), eyeballs, nostrils, and etc. Why are people so enchanted by such stuff? It's all a matter of hypnosis, a matter of stupidity. But without such stupidity, there's no poetry.

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  3. "Farther east, it produces such things as Muslim fanatics..."

    Pace the great Peter Ustinov, who once quipped on the Dick Cavett show that the Côte d'Azur is part of the Orient, one doesn't have to go all that far East to find exploding Muslims -- only as far east as the Boston Marathon.

    And this is not to mention the hundreds of other attacks by Muslims, or plots to attack, us on American soil (North American, including Canada) just in the past thirteen years since 9/11/01:

    the plot to blow up LAX airport in 2000;

    the "shoe bomber", December 22, 2001, American Airlines Flight 63 (Paris to Miami)

    September 2002, Muslim convert José Padilla arrested after returning from Pakistan for allegedly attempting to build a dirty bomb in Chicago, Illinois,

    March 13, 2003 A man was arrested and accused of giving aid to al-Qaeda and attempting to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge

    August 2004, Eleven members of the Virginia Jihad Network were arrested and accused of training for holy war around the globe.

    August 28, 2004 -- Security in the United States was put on high alert after a plot to destroy the New York Stock Exchange and other financial institutions in New Jersey and Washington

    Two men arrested after attempting to bomb the New York City Subway on the day before the 2004 Republican National Convention -- the two men were Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay

    August 2004 -- Two men were arrested at an Albany mosque after attempting to gain possession of a shoulder-fired grenade launcher to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat not in far-flung Oriental Karachi, but in Albany, New York -- Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain

    August 2005 Los Angeles-area military bases, synagogues and other places Four men running an Islamic prison gang were arrested after allegedly attempting to destroy Los Angeles-area places.

    April 2006 -- Two "men" (Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam) from the state of Georgia, arrested after videotaping Washington-area buildings and sending the tapes to a London based jihadist website.

    June 2006 -- Sears Tower and FBI offices Seven men (Muslims, of course) arrested after allegedly plotting to bomb Sears Tower and FBI offices.

    Et cetera, ad Islamonauseam. The list is a veritable mountain (which can be easily found online, as for example here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foiled_Islamic_terrorist_plots_in_the_post-9/11_United_States ). And it only covers North America; we would not be counting the dozens of plots to blow up the Eiffel Tower, for example (just to pluck one example from a keffiyeh of hundreds one could adduce over the years throughout Europe and the UK). For Mr. Simon to imply a comparative equivalence between this mountain which Mohammed has brought to us, and the preposterously minuscule "abortion clinic bombings" would be like saying that a toaster oven is equivalent ot the surface of the Sun. Sure, both of them are hot, I'll give you that.

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