Fools

There was a time when one wondered if he was a clown, a criminal or a psychopath. One such a man was Adolph Hitler. Now we have one among us. Any notion of his being a mere fool was slowly dispelled. For a while the idiocy obscured the menace. His inanities and profanities are now met with impunity. In fact, his simplistic utterances delivered with a ten-year-old vocabulary seem to endear himself all the more to his base. It gives a bad name to fools.

The archetype of the fool has traveled from Greek literature through Shakespeare into the 19th century and beyond. There are simpleton fools and wise fools. In literature they have often been characters who speak truth to power. Kings tolerate jesters, at least up to a point. They are amused by harmless antics. On the other hand, there have been periods when retardation was treated with scorn and worse.

The Bard gave life to fools with Falstaff in Henry IV, to King Lear as well as the motley fool in As You Like It. At times they act out the primitive instincts or the disowned self of their masters. Their wise words can be subversive but allowed in jest. Shakespeare gave them a voice to reveal an aspect otherwise denied the audience. Profundity disguised as comic relief.  

The fool was always the outsider who reframed the situation, offering a new dimension acceptable to the power elite. Mark Twain got invited to sit at the dinner table with robber barons of his day. Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller took his sarcasm, dealt in the haze of cigar smoke. The Gilded Age was added to our language by Samuel Clemens. Apparently, they welcomed his celebrity along with his wit.  

After WWI, fools found a home in periodicals, movies and then radio. Chaplin, the Little Tramp, poked his cane at millionaire tycoons on behalf of the working class, even though he, himself, was one of the richest men in Hollywood. The Marx Brothers also made their fortune playing audacious fools.

Audiences loved them and nobody more than the millionaire moguls of Hollywood. Never under-estimate the capacity of the power-elite to promote faintly subversive voices as long as they can monetize their presence.  

Dorothy Parker quipped, How could they tell, when President Coolidge died. Mort Saul, Tom Lehrer and George Carlin were far from fools as they jabbed convention along with words of Molly Ivins in print.

Political satire flourished on T.V. up until now. Our current monarch has very thin skin. The man has no decency, no empathy and no sense of humor. Wit directed at the man in the Oval is no longer permissible. It seems that the late night truth-tellers have a short lease from their corporate-owned networks. 

What the Tudor kings allowed has now been muzzled. The fool is dead; long live the fool.