As we watch national TV news, we notice that everybody comes on as an expert. Even the reporters -- who, let's face it, are not the newsmakers -- talk as if they too were experts.
I think there is a real need for non-experts. Somebody who says, "I don't know." They don't have to follow that with, "Nor, do I care," though sometimes that would be refreshing.
We need some village idiots, more fools on the hill, a couple of court jesters (in prime time, because talk show hosts are on too late and are too loud and too visible).
We live in a cultural climate in which people appear in public and make statements with great authority and officiousness. They include columnists, commentators, news anchors, doctors, lawyers, politicians -- well just about anybody in any field who can get a microphone, camera or reporter with a pen and notebook in front of them.
I am not saying that any of them are wrong. But they can't all be right all the time, yet they never add that caveat.
Therefore, I am running for the job of fool on the hill, or idiot down in the valley or the guy up the river without a paddle (is that bad?) or whatever title makes the point.
Now, there is very little precedent for wanting the job in real life. You may think that Comedy Central's faux news broadcast, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," fits the bill, but I'm being more serious here.
I look to the world of movies to make my point.
Recently I watched the Spike Lee film, "Do the Right Thing" on TV. It takes place on the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
More happens on that street on that day than I can go into here, but a key character -- despite his limited dialogue -- is Da Mayor, played with aplomb by the late actor Ossie Davis.
Da Mayor sees the hate, the loves, the pain. He takes it in and makes it profound by his silence, his grunts or grumbles.
The key to his importance to the film (I suggest as a viewer, not as an expert) is his innate simplicity. Those with personal agendas do not understand him, they dismiss him as an old, beer-addled fool. But he sees more clearly than all the others and provides a counterpoint to all the inanity of this day in this 'hood.
The fool need not always be a minor character. Evidence of that is Dustin Hoffman's title character in "The Graduate."
In the part of recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock, Hoffman's nonplussed reaction to his parents' friend, who tells him he has one word for the young Ben and the word is "plastics," is the perfect example of how the fool can make the most poignant of points. Later, when his parents insist he put on diving equipment for their friends, Ben heads to the bottom of the family's in-ground pool to end the chaotic scene in total silence, but for his breathing. Again, the silence of the fool speaks volumes.
"Doctor Zhivago," the book and the film, also puts the fool into several roles. All are foolishly regular lives amid the banality of war and the Russian revolution. Zhivago remains the poet, often another name for fool.
Shakespeare made great use of the fool in his plays to move his plot lines and illustrate his points. Sometimes the fool was in the person of a court jester, the kind of person who could tell the king what he really thought without getting his head chopped off. A court jester should be a permanent part of the White House staff. And he or she should have an office in Congress and the state Legislature, etc.
The fool on the hill or the village idiot is really all of us at times -- I say that with due respect, dear reader.
We are foolish because we see the world for the sham we have made of it, and we step aside from it and don't take it so seriously. That makes us foolish in the eyes of the self-styled wise and often ambitious.
It is the fools among us who will get us through these tough (dare I say strange?) economic times, and will get us beyond this presidential campaign season.
Fools once headed West. Remember Columbus or the pioneers or the California-bound settlers⢠How about our parents or grandparents or great grandparents who kept families together despite the pain of the Depression (read Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" or see the film by that name)?
Fools or village idiots need not be enterprising. They don't want to be heroes, nor well known, and certainly not famous. They just want to watch the passing parade, to be the ordinary folks with a quiet secret about how to enjoy life.
Meandering appears Fridays. To share your thoughts on this column (or on most anything) with Mike O'Hare, write to the Leader Times, P.O. Box 978, Kittanning, PA 16201 or via e-mail .
