I remember hanging out on the corner with the tough guys, waving at passing cars, preening for girls, bumming Winstons, planning turf fights. Stupid stuff. I once was arrested for hanging out there, but that’s another story.
One day, an older kid, Moondog, suggested we march to the White City Bridge that spanned Lake Quinsigamond, separating Worcester from Shrewsbury. Our mission: to stop traffic with clownish behavior before leaping off the bridge into the dark water below. Very stupid.
I didn’t feel stupid. I was pumped, exhilarated, proud even, as we sang the Animals’ hit “House of the Rising Sun,” 12 of us, screaming dissonantly, marching to the center of the bridge, traffic heavy on both sides. When some of us began to show nervousness, Moondog scoffed. One look from Moon was all it took.
Even today, I can feel the headlights blinding me as I got into it, raising my off-key voice, climbing over the railing, waving like an idiot, actually slowing some drivers down (perhaps in horror) as I pirouetted and leapt, feet first, into the dark, with my boys following, more afraid of breaking from the group than risking injury or worse. Stupid: all of us falling in, making it luckily to the bank, soaking wet, high fives all around, yelling, trying to sing, “And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy….”
Stupid, but not evil.
Stupidity, though, has its dark side. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian, imprisoned by the Nazis, wondered how someone like Hitler could take control of his beloved country, the country of Mozart and Martin Luther. Stupidity was his answer.
He wrote that stupidity has little to do with intelligence. We kids were not dumb, but we did let ourselves be led. To belong, I gave up my individuality, surrendering my intelligence, my critical thinking, my reflection, and my independence. A stupid teenage prank, luckily causing no harm. But what if Moondog had suggested we steal a car, or worse? Would I have gone along? Bonhoeffer suggests I might have.
Good and decent citizens of Germany did go along, became followers, embraced an ideology, making them so mindless they spouted slogans and catchwords as if they were under a spell, blinded, capable of monstrous evil while incapable of recognizing it as evil. Christian guards played with their children on Saturday, went to church on Sunday, and manned the ovens on Monday.
It makes me wonder about my country. It seems stupid that good and decent Americans would re-elect a convicted criminal, an adjudicated rapist, leader of an insurrection, bungler of the pandemic, a Russian and Saudi asset, an outspoken revenger, a failed businessman, a 78-year-old with mental lapses, a grifter who threatens American democracy itself.
Bonhoeffer understood the power of stupidity when he wrote, “Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
Bonhoeffer was hanged in a concentration camp. It took a world war to fix the stupidity he saw.
Jim McDermott was the 1988 Massachusetts Teacher of the Year. He lives in Eastham
