fool — a noble tradition

the word fool sits between two columns in my notebook. one column says cariñoso. the other says shakespearean. neither column says me, exactly, but both columns are willing to sublet. dave still owes me three hundred dollars. tom got married at a vineyard. i identify, broadly, with the noble tradition.

at the desk. the all-hands is running with the projector that hums. carla is in it. nobody is checking on me. let’s get into it.

so. the fool. people throw the word at me as if it were an insult. i have, after years of receiving it, come around to the position that being called a fool is, in fact, a compliment with bad press. there is a tradition here. a noble one. i am going to walk you through it from a chair i am, technically, not supposed to be sitting in for personal projects.

fool: a person who acts unwisely or appears to lack common sense. historically, the word also referred to a court jester — a paid truth-teller who hid sharp observations inside jokes. in modern usage, “fool” is mostly used as a soft insult. in older usage, it meant the only one in the room who could say the quiet part out loud. both meanings are alive. i answer to either.

A FOOL. IS NOT. THE STUPID ONE.

that should be entered into the file before we go anywhere else. some people will tell you a fool and an a person who is, by their own admission, not the brightest are the same person in different sweaters. those people are wrong. i can prove it in eight headings.

what a fool actually is, etymologically

the word fool comes from a latin word that meant, of all things, a bag of wind. literally, a bellows. an inflated thing. somebody who is full of air. that is the original idea — not stupid, just airy. the meaning drifted, the way meanings do, from “windbag” to “person who talks without thinking” to “person who acts without planning” to, finally, today, “person who voted against me on tuesday”. the slide is, frankly, embarrassing.

the older sense survives in the medieval court. the court fool, the jester, the licensed idiot in a hat with bells — that figure was paid. paid. with money. by kings. for being, theoretically, the dumb one. except the job description, if you read it carefully, is unsettlingly close to “consultant”. the fool was the only person allowed to tell the king he was wrong. everybody else got beheaded. the fool got a hat.

i mention this because the etymology of fool is one long argument with itself. on one side: bag of wind. on the other: the only honest man in the building. somewhere between those two, on a friday, is where i sit, at a desk i am not supposed to be using for this purpose, and call it research.

the fool in shakespeare, the smart one, secretly

i’m going to do a thing now that i don’t usually do, which is gesture toward shakespeare. i have not read all of him. i have read parts. i watched the 1971 film of “king lear” on a long flight in 2018, the kind of flight where the screen doesn’t tilt and you watch what’s playing because the alternative is your own thoughts. that is, technically, research.

the relevant point, in lear, is that the king goes mad and the only character who keeps telling him the truth is the fool. the fool says it in jokes. the fool says it in songs. the fool says it sideways. but the fool says it. everybody else, the smart ones, the powerful ones, the daughters with strategies — they lie. and the kingdom falls. the moral, if shakespeare allows me to extract one, is that the fool is, in the room, the smartest person allowed to speak. everybody else is censoring themselves. the fool is on payroll for the truth.

this is where i enter the argument. i am not a court fool. i don’t have the hat. i don’t have a king. i have carla, and an all-hands i am skipping. but the function is the same. somebody at the company has to say the email chain is too long. somebody has to say the renewal deck is the last quarter’s deck with a different cover. that somebody is, often, the one we call a fool. that line goes in the file as-is.

fool vs idiot vs jester, the holy trinity

let me lay this out, because the three terms get confused and i am, on a friday, in the mood to separate them.

idiot is, as i have argued elsewhere, a clinical word that has been promoted to a casual one. it used to mean a private citizen who didn’t participate in public life. now it means somebody who left the oven on. i identify with both.

fool is the romantic version. the fool is wrong on purpose, or wrong with style, or wrong in a way that ends up being right. the fool is the protagonist of a comedy. the idiot is the protagonist of a documentary about himself.

jester is the professional version of the fool. the jester gets paid. the jester has a contract. the jester reports to a king. i am, in this metaphor, an unpaid jester reporting to a man two floors up who is in another meeting. the gap between me and a jester is mostly a hat and a king. the rest is identical.

so the holy trinity, as far as i can defend it on a friday: the idiot doesn’t know. the fool knows but acts anyway. the jester knows, acts anyway, and gets paid for it. the goal, in life, is to graduate from idiot to fool to jester. i am, currently, between the first two. i’ll let you know how it goes.

examples of fools who turned out right, i’m building a list

i have been keeping, in a private document on my work laptop (i am aware this is a risk), a list of people called fools who turned out right. the list is not comprehensive. it is, however, growing.

• the man who said the earth was round when round was not in the company handbook.
• the man who said washing your hands before surgery might help. he was, at the time, considered a fool. he was, in retrospect, the only doctor in the room.
• my friend tom, who said in 2014 that he was going to buy a small house in a small town and have two kids and a volvo. tom was, by every metric available to me at the time, the fool of the group. tom now owns a house. tom drives the volvo. tom has a pension that he understands. i have a chair sourced from a goodwill in 2018 and a yoga mat under my couch from 2023, possibly evolving. tom and i are both valid. mine has more naps.
• the friend at every wedding who refuses to dance. eventually they are right. they have always been right. but at the moment of the song, they look like fools, alone in a chair near the bar.

i can extend the list. i won’t, because the all-hands ends at 3:51 and i have other headings.

fool me once, fool me twice, the math

everybody knows the phrase. fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice, shame on me. the math, however, is rarely examined. the math is bad.

i have been fooled by the same waiter, in the same restaurant, three times. each time he recommended the special. each time the special was the dish nobody else ordered. each time i took it. by the cited math, the shame is still his. he knows what he’s doing. he sees me coming. i am, in his system, a regular. it is, in the cleanest sense of the word, a partnership.

why being a fool is, technically, an art form

now, let me state this in flat english, one shot. being a fool, on purpose, is harder than it looks. the fool has to be wrong in a way that is funny. the fool has to be wrong in a way that exposes something. the fool has to be wrong in a way that, by the end of the room’s laughter, has left the room slightly smarter than it walked in. that’s the job. nobody pays me for it, but that’s the job.

this is the part where i bring in stefan. stefan is the friend, you know the type, who at every dinner has a wine recommendation. stefan can’t pronounce most of the names on the bottles, but stefan is confident, and stefan has been pouring with authority since 2017. stefan is, in the romantic sense, a fool. stefan is wrong about most of the wines. but stefan is also, by the end of the dinner, the reason the table is laughing. stefan is, technically, doing a job. an unpaid one. a noble one. i salute stefan.

(stefan does not know about this post. that is the only reason it exists.)

the hot take, the toilet paper roll, addressed

i am required, by the architecture of this post and by my own pulpit instincts, to plant a flag. so here it is.

the relevance to the topic of this post is that the man who took a stand on the toilet paper roll, in his own home, alone, with no audience, was — by every definition of the word — a fool. he was also, on the merits, correct. those two things are not in tension. they are, in fact, the same sentence.

verdict — i’d rather be a fool than the alternative

so here is the verdict, and i’ll keep it short, because carla’s all-hands has six minutes left and i can hear, faintly, somebody coming down the corridor.

i would rather be a fool than the alternative. the alternative, as far as i can tell from here, is the man who never says the quiet part out loud. the man who agrees with the deck. the man who nods through the email chain. the man who arrives at the wedding with the right tie and the right date and the right pension and never, in his entire life, tells the king the kingdom is on fire. that man is, technically, the smart one. nobody calls him a fool. they call him reasonable.

i, in contrast, am at a wedding alone. i have one tie. i own exactly one tie. (i own one tie. that is a fact about me. i wear it to all weddings. it has been to seventeen weddings. it has photographic evidence at most of them. the tie is, at this point, the most-traveled object in my apartment.) the wedding venue is one i know well — it was tom’s, four years ago. tom was, that day, the smart one. tom married the right person. tom got the volvo. i was, that day, in the wedding alone, doing the thing fools do at weddings, which is hold a glass of wine and observe other people’s choices with quiet, ruined sincerity.

the bar at tom’s wedding had, behind it, a man named mike. not the same mike who later became my regular at the corner bar — but it could have been. the bar mike says, every time i drink at the corner, that “the smart ones are the ones who don’t see the joke. the fools see the joke. that’s why they’re laughing.” mike’s relationship with the irs is best described as estranged. but mike, on this, is right.

carla drifted past the desk. screen flipped. she didn’t comment. she rarely does. by tradition that means either everything’s fine or everything’s about to be the opposite of fine.

the all-hands is over. the projector has, presumably, stopped humming. the ninety minutes have, somehow, become eleven. i am going to close this tab and open the one with the renewal deck. the renewal deck is, on inspection, the last quarter’s deck with a new cover. somebody should say it. it might as well be me.

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