My title today may prompt you to think, “Apparently, when Mickey does art it is stupid art.” If my title didn’t make you think that, then my first sentence certainly did. I am literally putting stupid ideas into your head. And this is a problem because the people currently at the top of the people pile that is our modern society are shoveling great smelly heaps of stupidity directly into our brains.
I know stupid. I was a public school teacher for thirty-one years. No one survives the mine-field of stupid bombs in the classroom without being able to recognize the incoming booby-head missiles. Years worth of lame homework excuses have made stupidity easily recognizable. Being stupid is easy. Countering it is hard.
So how does one be stupid? I nearly found out yesterday as I was driving on an access road for I-35. I was going the 40-mile-per-hour speed limit and got a phone call on my cell phone. All I did was look at my phone to see who was calling in case another school child was calling because pollen season was killing them again and they wanted to come home from school… again. My son shouted a warning of imminent death and I looked back at the road in time to see the car dealer had left a car-carrier trailer in the road with the ramp down. Wow! That was almost an epic Evel Knievel stunt.
But being epically stupid is simply a matter of not paying attention well enough. It is easy to achieve. Note how often President Cheeto-head achieves it.
I have also found it to be a remarkably easy thing to be stupid on Facebook and Twitter. All you have to do is post and repost stuff, or tweet and retweet stuff, that speaks to your own prejudices and ignores what is factual and what is not. I have seen very elaborate anti-climate change graphs that seem to show a correlation between sun activity and periods of warming and cooling climate. The biggest problem with this frequently debunked “take-that-and-stuff-it!” evidence is that it was created by a pair of propagandists with oil-company ties who were only masquerading as climate scientists.
When you vet that source and introduce evidence to your conservative Facebook friend you will get back a horrified speculation about the depths of your own stupidity for believing that Snopes.com is not also propaganda and you can’t believe everything NASA says because their funding is at stake. And I end up having to admit I do say similar things about their cherished sources like Infowars, Breitbart, and Fox News. Truth is apparently more the product of faith than it is the province of science.
Besides not knowing what facts are, it is fairly easy to be monumentally stupid by having no empathy at all. Iowegians who would bend over backwards and feed their own liver to a hungry Iowan, will routinely cry about the dangers of Sharia law and talk about wall building at the sight of Syrian widows and orphans. And don’t even get me started about shoot-first Texans. Not after they just shot and killed another unarmed black teenager in Balch Springs.
So how do you make an Art out of Stupid?
Well, the CBS Morning News has started running down the key events in the news with snippets quoted from late-night TV hosts and comedians like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah, and James Corden. You defeat stupidity by aping it, imitating it, and making people laugh at it. It is really defeated when you make someone laugh about their own stupidity, like the story about me and the I-35 launch ramp. Comedians seem to be the only ones effectively reporting on the current Presidential situation, and even CNN and MSNBC news anchors have begun making jokes in their reporting. I have become a lover of political cartoons like never before.
You may not be able to rescue other people’s minds from being stupid. But what you can do and be artful about is… make them laugh.
Ditty Bytcha who prefers to be called Fate is my number one son’s original character. He is a fighter wearing magic armor who loves to make things as an artificer (one who builds devices with magic). He eventually wants to cut his own arms off and replace them with mechanical ones. He is also quick to leap into the fray and is fairly deadly with his chosen weapons. He once made a crossbow that had explosive power enough to blast apart a ship and kill everyone on board, including the people he was trying to save. He is also a good leader and is always ready with a joke that can even make the Dungeon Master laugh.
Catch a Falling Star 
Hurtful Words
Yesterday’s post got me thinking about how words and the power behind words can actually hurt people. They can you know. Words like “brainiac”, “bookworm”, “nerd”, “spaz”, “geek”, and “absent-minded professor” were used as weapons against me to make me cry and warp my self-image when I was a mere unformed boy. I do not deny that I was smarter than the average kid. I also recognize that my lot in life was probably better than that of people assaulted with words like “fatty”, “moron”, “loser”, and “queer”. Being skinny as a child, there was actually only one of those deadly words that was never flung my direction. Words like that have the power, not only to hurt, but even to cripple and kill.
We all stand naked at times before a jury of our peers, and often they decide to throw stones.
I try to commit acts of humor in this blog. Or, at least, acts of verbal nit-witted goofiness that make at least me laugh. I have been told by readers and students and those forced to listen that I only think I am funny, and I am a hopelessly silly and pointless old man (a special thank you to Miss Angela for that last example, used to tell me off in front of a science class I was substitute teaching years ago.) But those words do not hurt me. I am immune to their power because I know what the words mean and I am wizard enough to shape, direct, and control their power.
I have stated before that I don’t approve of insult humor (usually right before calling Trump a pumpkin-head, or otherwise insulting other members of the ruling Empire of Evil Idiots). And I don’t mean to shame others or make them feel belittled by my writing. But sometimes it happens and can’t be helped.
This blog isn’t about entertainment. I am not a stand-up comedian working on joke material. I use this blog as a laboratory for creating words and ideas. It is mostly raw material that I mean to shape into gemstones that can be used to decorate or structurally support my crown jewel novels. I use it to piece ideas together… stitch metaphors and bake gooseberry pies of unusual thinking. I use it to reflect on what I have written and what I have been working on. And sometimes, like today, I use it to reflect on how readers take what I have written and respond or use it for ideas of their own. That’s why I never reject or delete comments. They are useful, even when they are barbed and stinging. I made an entire post out of them yesterday.
I try hard myself to be tough in the face of hurtful words. You have to learn that essential Superman skill to be a middle school and high school teacher. It is there in those foundries for word-bullets that the most hurtful words are regularly wielded. The skill is useful for when you need the word bullets to bounce off you, especially if you are standing between the shooter and someone else. But I can never feel completely safe. Some words are kryptonite and will harm me no matter what I do. Some words you simply must avoid.
Anyway, there is my essay on hurtful words. If you want to consider all of that being my two cents on the matter… well, I probably owe you a dollar fifty-five.
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Filed under angry rant, blog posting, commentary, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, William Shakespeare, wisdom, word games, wordplay, writing humor
Tagged as humor, hurtful words, insult humor, resisting hurtful words