Using the com to gain access to his locker after school one day, I took an uneaten tangerine from my lunch bag and thrust it onto the coat hook at the back of his locker. I then closed the door, and there it remained. My own locker being just a few down the row from Dave’s, whenever I saw him open it, I slid my eyes over hoping to observe his reaction when he discovered the prank. If Chris happened to be nearby, we’d exchange wide-eyed glances in anticipation.
Weeks went by. Chris, whose reward for giving me the locker com had been to witness the emplacement of the now-hallowed fruit, was moved to increasingly paroxysmal expressions of incredulity each time the locker opened and closed with its owner remaining oblivious to it. In this way, with each passing day the prank grew lusher and richer in its emotional depths even as the fruit on the coat hook withered, grew putrid, and dried.
Yes, I opened the locker a couple times just to make sure it was still there.
It was mine to do, but Chris wanted to be there. This wasn’t hard to arrange because we all had the same homeroom and our lockers were assigned together.
“Hey Dave,” I said at the next opportunity. “What’s that on the coat hook in your locker?”
Thinking back, it occurs to me now that what moved poor David to furious tears was his science nerd’s forensic realization, upon seeing the tangerine, that it was clearly not a partly rotten piece of fruit that had been placed on the hook that day as a prank: It had been there for awhile. No doubt, turning back to me and seeing Chris standing there grinning like a maniac added to the rapidly developing picture. The crushing emotional blow, which I had not anticipated and would not have had the heart to inflict if I had, was that in a flash Dave understood he’d been hanging his coat on this disgusting thing for weeks, and that he hadn’t even noticed.
For sheer cruel impact, it would have been difficult to devise a more perfect prank for this individual. Another boy probably wouldn’t have been able to quickly piece together the time factor embodied in the evidence, but instead would have instantly thrown that rotten piece of fruit at me as hard as he could, and thus evened the score.
But for Dave, no. Throwing the tangerine at me would have been a gesture of futility and defeat. Lucky for me, he was way too smart to do the simple, obvious thing.
Looking around today, I suspect that the vast majority of the American intelligentsia are basically in the same position as Dave in being royally, cruelly pranked. Thing is, nobody is going to tell them, and most certainly won’t figure it out for themselves. The big question we have to ask ourselves is, are we using our reasoning ability to avoid realizations that result in painful emotional impact, or are we willing to think, assemble the evidence, and construct our understandings regardless of any emotional pain that may result?
If you’re wondering how reason is functioning in your life — whether as a revealer of new lights on things or as a co-conspirator in perpetuating darkness, here’s a self-diagnostic protocol to run on your brain to help you decide what’s really going on: When was the last time you totally changed your ideas about something, forcing you to inwardly or outwardly recant a position you previously held as true? When have you discovered yourself to be completely wrong in your ideas?
That’s the point of thinking: to change our minds. If our minds are not changing — often painfully, as seems to be the rule with real growth — then we are not thinking. And that may be okay too, but let’s acknowledge what this really is: self-hypnosis.
To Dave’s credit, once presented with a fact, his intelligence led to the correct conclusions…and with them, emotional pain. Thus, while Dave’s reasoning ability played a critical role in the emotional impact of the prank, it also ended it.
However, the function of reason in the pranking of many otherwise intelligent people these days seems to run in the opposite direction: reason as an enabler of further self-deception, averting both realization and emotional impact, which in turn encourages yet more deception, fueling roguery without end.
Zu klug ist dumm, as the Germans say: Too smart is stupid.
In any con game, those who are convinced of their own smartness and rightness and who have built an identity centered on it are pretty much the easiest marks around.
Here’s my working hypothesis as I negotiate the media landscape today:
· Bought-and-paid-for science is bought-and-paid-for science.
· Bought-and-paid-for reporting is bought-and-paid-for reporting.
· Bought-and-paid-for politicians are bought-and-paid-for politicians.
· Bought-and-paid-for “experts” and opinions are bought-and-paid-for “experts” and opinions.
Further, I’m assuming that since other people are writing the checks for these things, they are probably getting the results they want. I also assume that since I am not paying for these things, it is quite likely that my needs, values and interests do not align with the needs, values and interests of those who are.
If this all sounds reasonable but your first thought is, “Yeah, but how bad can it possibly be?”
…well, I’ve been asking myself the same question, and I don’t like the answers I’ve been coming up with. Lately I’ve even started to toy with the idea that those who are writing the checks might be asking this very question, but from their angle: “How bad we can make it for these dupes, and how fast? How much horribleness can the American people be induced to tolerate, and how can those of us writing the checks benefit?”
These are not comfortable thoughts, but I can’t help that. Having been both the prankster and the pranked-upon, I remain on the lookout for rotten tangerines. They’re often surprisingly hard to see, but once I do see them, I’m sure not going to kid myself about it.
Careful what you hang your hats and coats on, my friends.
