184. Loss of a Good Word: "Stupidity."

 

 

Fifty years ago John Fischer, editor of Harper's, wrote that America's greatest problem in years to come would be, in one word, "stupidity."  How easily that word flowed out of his typewriter into his weekly column.  Sure, folks, when we get into the complicated, high-tech, society of the coming decades there aren't going to be enough smart people to keep it going.  "Yep," his readers said, or were expected to say, "there'll be too many stupid people."  Those are the kinds of words your mind fell into in those days.  His title, "The Stupidity Problem," greased the way.

Now the right word for that habit, I am sure, is "insensitivity," and I think our efforts to deserve its opposite, "sensitivity," are all to the good.  But there are times when the old, blunt word cries out for you to use it.

Right now I'm having a hard time resisting that cry.  Before me is an observation after the Connecticut classroom slayings by Congressman Louie Gohmert (R - Texas) that "mass killings happen where citizens tend to be unarmed."  Oh, if only the teacher in that classroom had had gun. 

There's only one thing you can say about that.  It's so goddam stupid that if you say anything else you're a language moron. 

Some statements these days, and from this camp, are so stupid that naming them is not enough.  You want to address the speakers directly.  Like those militia types that quote Ron Paul on the need for protection against an out-of-control government.  "You expect people to shoot it out with the government?  Using Bushmasters?  Don't you know that the Army can bring a tank in there and shoot their asses off?"  Gun people are so dumb they don't even understand firepower.

But I don't want anybody to think "stupidity" is applicable only at one end of the political spectrum.  Here's the socialist President of France, Francois Hollande, giving as his reason for abolishing homework in the schools that "homework gives children whose parents are able to help them with it — more educated and affluent parents, presumably — an advantage over children whose parents are not" (New Yorker, 12-17-12).

The President, according to Louis Menand, "wants to give everyone an equal chance."  By making the smart ones dumber.

I can't use Fischer's word for that without thinking of the future Fischer tried to foresee.  He missed the compensatory comfort: we'll be incapable of keeping a complicated, high-tech society going but we'll all be equally incapable.