Durban - No-one has ever accused me of being a genius, stable or otherwise.
Sometimes, on complicated issues, I remind myself of that famous quote: better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
It’s so famous that, according to a quick bit of internet “research”,
no-one really knows who said it first.
It has falsely been attributed to Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, among others, but it’s a very smart idea and we should all be heeding it.
Mull things over a bit; consider the other side of the question; could they be right?
Basically, just be a bit thoughtful, and don’t join the “confederacy of dunces”, the title of one of my
all-time favourite books.
Written by John Kennedy Toole, it was only published, thanks to his mother Thelma’s belief in the book, 11 years after he committed suicide, and it earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer.
Which brings me neatly to
the difference between a Pulitzer and a “Noble prize”, and the inspiration for the title of the book - a quote from Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
I have news for Swift: this time the “confederacy of dunces” is totally, all-the-way locked into their “true genius”.
It was proven once again after the descendant of a student at MIT, that top-notch science college, who now occupies the White House, said victims of Covid-19 could be injected with, or otherwise ingest, bleach to clean out their lungs in minutes.
Within the next 24 hours, health officials in various states reported hundreds of calls to toxin centres asking whether people could really do this. As of writing, I haven’t heard about an actual death attributed to this.
But I have heard (and read on Twitter) astonished, outraged shock that a man with a country full of top-notch scientists actually said that in a broadcast seen around the world. Bleach maker Lysol issued a statement telling people to follow the directions of their medical doctors and the health warnings on their products, clearly stating it was for external use only.
But one of my favourite “confederacy of dunces” moments was a viral video.
It featured a (what’s the collective noun for dunces?) group of people attired in confederacy flags - sort of like a bunch of white people jolling around wrapped in the ugly, hated, old South African flag - singing, dancing, doing semaphore thus exposing their arse(nals) in time to a YMCA song.
Now, most of these people are known to have strong right-leaning philosophies, as does their president, including a dislike for people whose sexual partners aren’t of the opposite sex.
It’s clear, too, that they have no clue that the song and the group they were emulating and using as a protest song against lockdown, used their musical platform to celebrate gay sex.
As for the Noble prize: the
stable genius tweeted that the media was only attacking him because they wanted to win a “Noble prize”, the sort of prize won (controversially, it must be said) by his predecessor, Barack Obama, whom the current incumbent loathes.
Journalists win Pulitzer Prizes. Authors can win Nobel prizes.
Oh, for a silent genius.