Published: March 31, 2008 02:57 pm         

Dumbness nowadays: no lack of examples

Honest. I was planning to write this column on dumbness (to go with the last one on niceness) before Eliot Spitzer turned into such a perfect target for sport shooting.

Still, I am going to attempt the impossible here and try to ignore him, because there are so many others of us who can’t seem to avoid acting dumb either — not so staggeringly, I grant you, but dumb all the same.

Dumb, it seems, is the one constant of the human condition. (By the way, it has little in common with niceness — not everybody is nice, but everybody can be dumb, and often is.) Dumbness can range from absent-mindedly giving the children’s cough syrup to the wrong daughter (Mary Hensel) to absent-mindedly expecting your body’s going to work 40 years later the way it did when you were 38. (Me.)

Dumb is having a thermostat installed in the center of a wall, instead the corner, so that you will never ever again be able to hang a picture there. Dumb is not thawing the turkey in time to easily remove the bag of giblets, resulting in finger frostbite you wouldn’t believe. Dumb is being so doubly dense that you know what he means when a Philbert character says, “My theory is that his ignorance clouded his poor judgment.”

Dumb is the 36-year-old guy who was depressed by financial and romantic troubles several years ago and jumped off the Tampa Bay Bridge. “As I got closer to the bottom,” he later said, “I had the feeling this was a bad idea.” Luckily for him, he was able to swim for 50 yards to a bridge pylon where he held on for (suddenly) dear life, in spite of having a broken neck, ruptured spleen, and collapsed lung. Some dumb people seem to have smart guardian angels.

Have I ever told you about a singularly dumb incident MHTB (My Husband the Bagpiper) and I shared in after we had graduated from Gettysburg Seminary and were looking for a job for him? MHTB had preached in a church that was looking for a pastor and we were invited out for Sunday dinner to the home of an important parishioner, named Hively. (We had some best friends named Shively, and it seemed like a good omen.)

To begin with, it was in August and hot as blazes, and I was pregnant. I hope you won’t be shocked to hear that I was also wearing a girdle — calm down, we wore them in those days, OK? It was so tight I could hardly stand it. So I took it off in the bathroom, but my purse was too small to hold it. (That was before my purse gained weight, with the kids and all. )

Just for a moment, I left the girdle hanging on the side of the tub. I was going to ask for a bag to put it in, but got so busy talking I forgot about it. Forgot about it, that is, until, about a half hour later, the lady of the house came down the steps, distastefully holding it at arm’s length from her body, and said, “I think you forgot something.”

But we weathered that storm; luckily pregnancy can excuse a lot of dumb. Things were going, if not swimmingly, at least wadingly, as we all sat out on the patio drinking cold drinks, except for MHTB who had had to go inside for a moment. Just as he was coming back through the hall, the phone rang, so, aiming to save the family trouble, he answered it. A few minutes later he came out beaming. “Relax” he said. “ I just saved you some effort on this hot day. Somebody just called and asked for Mr. Hively, and I told him. ‘Sorry, wrong number. This is the Shively residence.’ “ Do I need to tell you we didn’t get that church?

Modern art is a tricky subject even to venture upon, because it’s a sure thing that what some people consider dumb, other people consider art. Still I’m going to risk it, because there are some projects, like some children, that only the artist (or parent) can love.

Take a Washington, DC artist in 2003 who decided that dust could be artistic, and installed five works in a local gallery, all of which consisted of dust harvested from different houses. Some of it was packed into three-inch cubes and set on shelves, but the more impressive one involved large piles of dust which were connected by pulleys to the bathroom door. Whenever it was opened “fluffy dust balls fell gently” onto observers, as well as a nearby (originally working) computer. Sorry, critics, that’s dumb.

I hate to contribute to blondism as a symbol for dumbness in our modern culture. Like the blonde who tried to put M&Ms in alphabetical order. And the blonde who, when she missed Bus 44, took Bus 22 twice instead. And the blonde who spent 20 minutes staring at the orange juice can because it said, “Concentrate.” But we all know that most blondes are not real blondes, anyway, so that should work against prejudice, right?

Well, anyway, blondes, for better or worse, have become the symbol of dumbness in our modern culture, but dumb people come in all hair colors, after all. Here’s where blondes get their revenge.

Did you hear about the guy who accidentally walked into the gal biker bar, and asked for a drink? After he downed it he asked, “Do you want to hear a dumb blonde joke?” The female bartender looked hard at him and said, “Listen, fella, I’m a blonde and I’ve got a baseball bat right here under the bar. And on your right is a blonde female wrestler, and on your left is a blonde female boxer. And at that table right behind you is a blonde woman with a gun. And at the other table next to her is a blonde lady with a knife. Are you sure you still want to tell your dumb blonde joke?”

The guy says, “No, thanks, I guess not. I don’t want to have to explain it five times.”

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her column appears on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.