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“FOOL me once, shame on me,” goes the saying notoriously mangled by former US president George W. Bush. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” Well, shame on him, on several accounts. He’s not the only one to get fooled, though.
We all do. Almost always by politicians. Invariably by clerics. Frequently by the media. Often enough by friends and relatives and supposed well-wishers. And no, it’s got nothing to do with All Fools’ Day, which comes but once a year. It’s a daily occurrence.
In some cases, the same tactics are rolled out year after year. Their absurdity is irrelevant, because we get fooled again and again. Take, for instance, what could be described as the 99pc factor — whereby consumers supposedly prefer a price tag of, say, $9.99 to one that rounds it up to $10. The minuscule and in most cases irrelevant difference is presumably a psychological success, hence it remains annoyingly entrenched.
What does that tell us about human nature? Why is scepticism such a rare quality? How does it differ from cynicism?
Commercial retailers are not half as deplorable as political vendors. However deceptive the former’s price tags might be, at least they are there for everyone to see. Mediocre or worse leaders get elected time and again, often on the basis of promises they clearly have no intention of keeping. Desperation breeds gullibility. It’s easy to latch on to hopes, no matter how ridiculous they might seem, because the alternative looks even bleaker.
Collective fear is often all too easy to manipulate, not least in combination with the desire for revenge. A dozen years ago, the majority of Americans deemed it was appropriate to attack Iraq because a great many of them accepted the official implication of Baghdad’s involvement in 9/11.
More than a decade on, all too many of those who propelled the West into an unwinnable war continue to insist it was the right thing to do.
The cruel Saddam Hussein is history. No harm done, right?
Well, no. Wrong. Hundreds of thousands of deaths later, much of Iraq is contested territory. Between the self-styled Islamic State — an entity that did not exist until the American-led invasion — and Iran, denigrated back in the day by the US president as a component of the Axis of Evil, but now a crucial component of the pushback against IS.
Our propensity to be asses remains intact, and not only on April 1.
Islamic State, aka Daesh, has meanwhile emerged as a key point of attraction for the easily fooled, with hundreds rushing to join it from countries such as Britain, Australia and France. Most of them are Muslims by birth or conversion, and their gullibility in all too many cases proceeds from their unstable state of mind.
Western nations wring their hands over what these recruits might get up to when they return to their countries of birth, but surely the primary issue is that most of them won’t. Their alienation from the societies in which they grew up all too often propels them towards fatal consequences.
It’s far more pleasant, of course, to reflect upon the relatively benign intentions (and consequences) of dedicated April 1 deceptions such as BBC Television’s hoax documentary in 1957 about spaghetti “crops” — and, many years later, the declaration by one of its radio outlets that Britain had overnight reversed its drive-on-the-left rule.
April 1, though, is just another date on the calendar. Some All Fools’ Day jokes work only too well, while most of them invariably fall flat. What’s far more alarming is the human tendency to be fooled time and again, every day of the year, by the political or media elite.
Back in the 1960s, after a chance encounter with an acquaintance who had lately been roped in as a presidential adviser by a military dictator, the Pakistani poet Habib Jalib, channelling his interlocutor, railed against “yeh das crore gadhay jin ka naam hai awaam” — these 100 million asses, the public is their name.
The irony in which his verse was steeped may have been lost in the mists of time. And the figure — harking back to a time when Pakistan boasted two ‘wings’ — is certainly a thing of the past. The imprecation, though, retains its validity. There may be a lot more of us now — and it’s not just Pakistanis who fit the bill — but our propensity to be asses hasn’t diminished. And it’s by no means restricted to April 1.
More than a decade ago, the American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore wanted for the soundtrack of his eventually Oscar-winning film Fahrenheit 9/11 the song ‘Won’t get fooled again’ by The Who. He wasn’t able to obtain the rights to it, and made do with The Animals’ ‘We gotta get out of this place’.
The track harks back to the Vietnam era. But it’ll do as the song for today.
Published in Dawn, April 1st, 2015
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