Jenifer’s Journal: April Foolishness

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.   — Mark Twain  

Friday will be — April Fools’ Day!

However, the month of April doesn’t have a corner on the “foolishness” market — hardly, given the sheer volume of foolishness extant in the world — so much that we may be forced to add a month or two to the calendar just to contain it all.

And I’m not just talking about the fond, funny, benign brand of foolishness, but the dangerous, delusional kind that corrodes judgment and critical thinking. According to the “April Fools’ Day” article in Wikipedia:

“For centuries, versions of ‘April Fools’ Day’ have shown up in cultures all over the world. The day is not a public holiday in any country except Odessa, Ukraine, where the first of April is an official city holiday… In 1508, French poet Eloy d’Amerval referred to a poisson d’avril (April fool, literally “April’s fish”), possibly the first reference to the celebration in France.

Some writers suggest that April Fools’ originated because, in the Middle Ages, New Year’s Day was celebrated on 25 March in most European towns, with a holiday that in some areas of France, specifically, ended on 1 April, and those who celebrated New Year’s Eve on 1 January made fun of those who celebrated on other dates by the invention of April Fools’ Day.”

“In Scotland, April Fools’ Day was originally called ‘Huntigowk Day.’ The name is a corruption of ‘hunt the gowk,’ gowk being Scots for a cuckoo or a foolish person; alternative terms in Gaelic would be Là na Gocaireachd, ‘gowking day,’ or Là Ruith na Cuthaige, ‘the day of running the cuckoo.’

The traditional prank is to ask someone to deliver a sealed message that supposedly requests help of some sort. In fact, the message reads ‘Dinna laugh, dinna smile. Hunt the gowk another mile.’ The recipient, upon reading it, will…contact another person, and they send the victim to this next person with an identical message, with the same result.”

“[Similarly], in Ireland, it was traditional to entrust the victim with an ‘important letter’ to be given to a named person. That person would read the letter, then ask the victim to take it to someone else, and so on. The letter when opened contained the words ‘send the fool further.’”

Whatever the specific national spin, to this day the “fooling” always requires two necessary components: the “fooler,” dedicated to concocting a fake story, or circumstance, and the “foolee,” someone gullible enough to believe it.

The hilarity of the day rests, in fact, on the quality of the disinformation supplied by the former and the near-infantile naiveté of the trusting latter. It’s the one day of the year when mendacity is freed from the fetters of shame and condemnation and allowed to run rampant through otherwise polite society. In fact, according to that Wikipedia article, in Poland, “hoaxes — sometimes very sophisticated — are prepared by people, media (which often cooperate to make the ‘information’ more credible) and even public institutions.

Serious activities are usually avoided, and generally every word said on 1 April could be untrue.”  What fun! Except, in this, the 22nd year of the new millennium, widespread, grand-scale  lying is not confined to 24 hours, but churned out 24/7 by powerful people and institutions that have no fear of ‘shame and condemnation’ — morally, socially, politically and even legally — because consequences no longer seem to exist. For instance:

A month ago, Putin declared that, while the rumors of invasion were “fake news,” it would be justifiable for Russia to invade the aggressor, Nazi-ruled Ukraine, in order to liberate the terrified Russian-speaking citizens living there.

A global-sized whopper that, four weeks later, continues to produce thousands of corpses — Russian, Ukrainian, men, women, children in a brutal, completely unjustified conflict. In this country, in the last several years, we’ve had leaders pumping out high-calorie disinformation about everything from crowd sizes to faux-fraudulent elections to terrorist “tourists,” in spite of the fact that the truth about them is documented and provable.

The Russian people believe Putin’s putrid lie because — already chronic victims of propaganda and now cut off from many social media platforms and all but Kremlin-approved media outlets — they literally don’t know any better.

But what’s our excuse?  There’s nothing new about the foolers — despots and dictators — paving their regimes with falsehoods, except that now technology has expanded their reach exponentially. What’s really changed is the willingness of great swaths of foolees to be lied to.

Maybe it has something to do with it being much less complicated to live in a dictatorship than in a democracy, where — for the health of your nation — you actually have to take responsibility for making reasonable, well-informed, fact-based decisions.

How’s it go? “Fool me once, shame on you…”