Walter Kish

This has been a banner week for news depicting man’s limitless ability to push the boundaries of stupidity. With the earth’s population now being counted in the billions, it should hardly be surprising that we should in perusing our daily paper, encounter some interesting if not imaginative examples of an intellectually challenged brain gone amuck. However, when such examples come not from the margins of humanity, but from the leaders and elite of our society, then it is cause for us to question whether there is something wrong with the water or if perhaps the planet’s excess greenhouse gases are affecting our brains as well as our climate.

A prime example was the international political brouhaha caused by our Prime Minister’s Director of Communication being caught calling President Bush a "moron" at a NATO summit meeting in Prague. Now I am sure that many ordinary people, including Americans, regularly use this term in reference to the President, as they probably do with our PM as well. Political leaders are subjected to such diatribes as a matter of course. It is part of the political game. However the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications is no ordinary person. This is a highly placed political professional, supposedly expert in the art of communications, PR and spin doctoring. That such an individual would in public call the President of the richest and most powerful country in the world a moron almost defies credulity. To compound this act of utter stupidity even further, the PM has refused to accept this individual’s resignation, and is keeping her on board in this key staff position.

This same NATO meeting witnessed another fine example of stupidity in action, with the key player being Ukraine’s very own President Kuchma. As we all know, he has become a pariah in international political circles not only for the inefficiency and corruption that is a hallmark of his administration, but more recently for the scandal surrounding his alleged involvement in selling prohibited high-tech radar systems to Iraq. Despite the NATO leaders making it quite clear that he was not welcome at their deliberations, Kuchma decided to show up at the summit anyway, crashing the gathering’s culminating banquet. Normally, heads of state are seated in alphabetical order, and the hosts would have been obliged to seat Kuchma next to the heads of state of other "U" countries, namely Tony Blair of the United Kingdom and President Bush of the U.S. Now Blair and Bush wouldn’t be caught dead within a ten foot pole of Kuchma, so the resourceful hosts decided to use NATO’s second official language, namely French, to determine seating arrangements, placing Kuchma at the tail end of the banquet table next to Turkey. It seems that Kuchma has now shown himself to be not only a pariah, but embarrassingly lacking in common sense as well.

A more tragic example of stupidity this week occurred in Nigeria, site of this year’s Miss World contest. Nigeria happens to be primarily a Muslim country, and when a local reporter made a flippant remark in an article as to how the prophet Mohammed would have no doubt picked one of the competing beauties to be his wife had he been alive today, the local fanatics saw fit to go on a riotous rampage resulting in over a hundred grisly deaths and numerous churches burnt to the ground. I can’t decide who was stupider, the daft reporter who penned the original offending words, or the mindless mobs that perpetrated the riots and brought insult and shame to one of the world’s great religions.

My last example of mind-boggling official stupidity goes to the organizers of this year’s Grey Cup, one the great events in Canada’s sports calendar. The Grey Cup is as Canadian as the beaver, and this year’s championship is being held in Edmonton, with Edmonton and Montreal as finalists. For some unexplainable reason, the organizers decided that the national anthem kicking off the game would only be sung in English and not in English and French as has been the long tradition. Predictably, this resulted in a public outcry, particularly from the Mayor of Montreal and our fellow citizens in La Belle Province. Rather than apologize and atone for this unconscionable oversight, the organizers decided to stick to their guns, stating that it was the game that was more important and not the language in which the anthem was going to be sung! Fortunately saner heads have prevailed and the anthem will be sung in both official languages, but it defies understanding how supposedly intelligent and responsible officials could be so oblivious to the most fundamental aspect of Canada’s cultural and ethnic character.

I can only shake my head and agree with the old aphorism that where human beings are concerned, intelligence is limited, but stupidity knows no bounds!