“D. C.” Stands for “Da Capital”: Fools, Etc.

“The purest fooling is neither stupid nor ignorant; it’s wit, and it often strikes like lightning turning sand to glass.”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“Ignorance, the lost part of ‘virginal,’/is a barefoot girl at a urinal.” —The Wordspinner

“When Skip tries to learn what students don’t know,/the class goes still in a stunned tableau.” —The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—3/7/2016—Ignorance may be illustrated by those who thought the Earth was a round, flattened disk in 1,000 B.C. Stupidity is their descendants’ stubborn faith in The Flat Earth Society 3,000 years later. And foolishness is the refusal to sail across the ocean today for fear of sailing off the disk.

When at a supper party honoring William Faulkner, a woman, thinking she was going to sit, fell backwards, Faulkner immediately took a seat beside her to offer his condolences. Surely, this couple must have looked foolish sitting on the floor in elegant dress, but Faulkner was sufficiently self-possessed that he did not care. The journalist Larry Levinger found Faulkner’s gesture “noble, tender, and humane,” but it seems that if Faulkner was so tenderly understanding, why didn’t he help the “surprised and chagrined” lady to her feet? Looking foolish beside a famous man with her dress above her knees, she may not have been as confident as he.

One cannot discuss fools without offending the marginal fool, but the subject is just too rich to pass over. “Stupidity, like sleep,” wrote Lance Morrow, “is a universal, surreal, and mysterious phenomenon, a brownout, the mind passing through a tunnel.” Universal as it is, one still needs to be careful using “foolish” to label the foolish lest the label return to the labeler. The Bible explicitly warns against using “fool” and then through some linguistic legerdemain uses it 66 times. Never one to suffer fools lightly, Jay Leno used to send an associate onto the street with a camera operator to ask unsuspecting pedestrians such questions as, “Who was nicknamed ‘Tricky Dick?’” Many of us who are old enough to remember Dick Nixon are surprised at the ignorance of a younger person who doesn’t know the answer. But one pedestrian who answered “Bill Clinton” may have been punning on the ex-president’s fabled male member and his “explanation” that oral sex wasn’t really sex. If both answers are correct, who is the fool?

Despite five hundred million years of evolution, humans aren’t the only fools in the animal kingdom. According to Richard Feynman, tropical leaf-cutting ants, whose only food is a fungus grown on the leaves they harvest, have “a very interesting stupidity.” Feynman has observed that an ant has a 50-50 chance of grasping the segment it has just cut instead of the leaf still attached to the stem. It seems that half the leaves these industrious insects cut fall to the forest floor where they rot, wasting half of the ant’s labor. It’s something like experienced bakers discarding every other bread loaf they pull from the oven because they’re too lazy to pick them up.

Comedian Jeff Foxworthy, who has a keen eye for celebrities no smarter than fifth graders, has made a lucrative career out of calling his fellow Southerners fools. Knowing my sophomores were fans of Foxworthy and under-appreciative of William Faulkner, I once asked them to write up a Foxworthian description of Ab Snopes, many of whose social betters took him for a fool. The class concluded that Ab was “not white trash, but toxic waste.” His idea of a seven-course meal was “a six-pack and a possum.” His “junior prom provided day care,” he “financed his tattoos,” and he’d often been “too drunk to fish.”

Unscrupulous as he was, Mr. Snopes was not stupid, but his native intelligence was warped by his anger at the tenant-farmer system he’d inherited. Shrewd as he was, I would not expect Ab to stick his tongue into a 12-inch electric fan whirling on “High” just to see if he could stop the blades. But numerous people in the David Letterman segment entitled “Stupid Human Tricks” and on the television series “Jackass” seem desperate to expand the definition of “fool” to include their dangerous stunts. YouTube bristles with people sitting in bathtubs with a frayed extension cord inches from the water. As H. L. Mencken said, “Nature abhors a moron,” and her abhorrence often results in injury or death.

Nevertheless, ignorance, if not stupidity, is often forgivable. Indeed, at some point in his life, even Albert Einstein could not do long division, but would anyone hold that against him at age three? Many Americans clucked recently when a poll showed that 65 percent of the British did not know where the musical Chicago is set. But am I a fool for not knowing that when Bill Bryson announced he was returning to “Little Dribbling,” he’d created a fictional town? Ignorance of the law may not be an excuse, but ignorance of fictional geography certainly may be.

When my German wife, who’d never seen an American football game, thought the quarterback was a refund, her American co-workers smiled at this ignorance as if it were a yo-yo, cute but otherwise without merit. When some Down Syndrome children were taken strawberry picking and one brought in a basket of leaves, the farm owner found nothing to smile about. But late one night, when a young mother came to the ER with a fist-sized lump of wax in her baby’s stomach, she was charged with abuse. The charges were later dropped when the prosecutor realized the mentally-challenged but devoted mother had heated the baby’s milk in a wax-lined, cardboard container before feeding her child. But when Texas home builders ran lead pipes to homes and businesses as late as 1930, they pled ignorance. Yet if humans have known that lead is toxic for over a thousand years, why weren’t the fools prosecuted? The fact is lead water pipes weren’t even illegal in this country until 1986.

I would be remiss in closing if I didn’t tell the tale of Faust’s sibling, Hans. Having failed in his attempt to buy the elder brother’s soul, the devil decided to retire from the soul business. However, having no shadow and envious of the ominous shade humans cast, the devil begged to buy Hans’s shadow—a hundred pounds of gold for every foot he could produce. Hans agreed, and the following day at dawn, he entered hell trailing a 20-foot shadow. Said the devil, “You’re early—come back at noon.”

I’ll never forget smiling self-righteously as I passed a German instructor’s open door. He was jabbing away energetically at a map of Europe with a yard stick, saying, “Hier! Hier sind die Deutschen!” It’s hard to believe that among 20 college freshmen enrolled in a German class no one could locate Germany on a map. But on the second day of the same semester, I asked a young lady if she’d received my email. She had written me a week earlier saying that her semester-at-sea cruise ship was running behind schedule and would miss the first day of class. I wrote her back saying I would not drop her and sent her the syllabus. When she said she’d printed my materials, I asked her where she’d been when she received my email.

“I’m not sure where we were,” she said.

Certain she’d misunderstood, I said, “I don’t mean the exact coordinates—what ocean were you in?”

“I don’t know.”

I bit my tongue and continued calling the roll. We had a lot to cover.

The purest fooling is neither stupid nor ignorant; it’s wit, and it often strikes like lightning turning sand to glass. I’m thinking of a woman whose family had a history of multiple births who winked and said to her worried husband, “Honey, I’m not having twins—I’ve never been capable of multiple orgasms.” Robert Bates captured the essence of such delicious fooling in the following quatrain:

Behold the doors,

A plate-glass duo;

One says IN

The other TUO.

Aristotle thought, “There’s a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.” Perhaps this is why Einstein refused to wear socks.

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522.