Bill Ralston considers stupidity

Stupidity is a condition that can range from mild foolishness to rank idiocy and it is an extremely common phenomenon when it comes to humans.

It can be brought on by a variety of factors. For example, fear or self-interest overriding common sense, as in the case of Renee-Nicole Douceur. She is the winter manager at the Amundsen-Scott research station in Antarctica who had a stroke in August. She has had some loss of vision and is off work while awaiting treatment. Douceur and her niece ran a vociferous campaign online and in the US media to have her airlifted out to New Zealand.

The problem is that in August, September and much of this month Antarctica is in perpetually dark winter. The temperatures can turn an aircraft’s fuel to jelly, and there are the blinding blizzards and unlit runways deep in snow, all of which tend to inhibit flying. Indeed, no plane has ever landed on the ice there before the middle of this month. To try any earlier, experts say, would gravely endanger the plane, the crew and any passengers – including Douceur – should the aircraft by some miracle successfully land but then try to take off back to New Zealand.

Anyone who is a winter manager at the South Pole must know when taking the job that she or he will be cut off from the outside world for several months with no hope of immediate rescue should something go wrong. Douceur must have known about the 1999 case of an American doctor who was forced to treat herself for breast cancer while stuck there for months.

I have sympathy for anyone who has a stroke and I hope she returns to this country soon and gets the medical care she needs, but to suggest there be an earlier flight, which would endanger the lives of flight crew, is plain stupidity.

At a much less serious and far stupider end of the scale lies the kind of stupidity that only Hollywood can spawn. For example,  the actress Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame blames her childhood teachers for failing to support her acting ambitions by giving her extra tuition at school. “They failed me. My teachers failed me. Not one, but all of them,” she wailed. Stewart is conservatively estimated to be worth in excess of $30 million, even though those teachers failed her. Imagine what she’d be worth if she had a high school diploma.

By the way, it’s worth noting Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Richard Branson were all dropouts from either university or school, so she really shouldn’t be so mean to her old teachers.

Schools, of course, are capable of their own acts of stupidity. In a growing trend in Britain, some have begun outlawing skirts for girls, forcing them to wear boys’ uniform trousers. You’ll be shocked to hear this, but, apparently, young girls have been hiking up their hemlines so their gym slips become mere “pussy pelmets”, and compulsory trousers are the only recourse to modesty left for the despairing teachers.

Go back nearly half a century and blame Mary Quant, Twiggy and the Swinging Sixties for the miniskirt, but do these educators really think you can desexualise teenagers? How long before they have to start banning extra-tight bum-hugging trousers? What happens in summer when shorts become hot pants? This is a stupid battle those schools are bound to lose.

Sport is the classic arena for stupidity. Being a star of the English rugby team, newly wed to the Queen’s granddaughter and being caught on a bar’s security camera nuzzling a woman not your wife is fairly stupid, trumped only by virtually anything done during the RWC by teammate Manu Tuilagi. However, the stupidest act in sports this month had to involve the demented man who threw a hotdog at Tiger Woods on the seventh green at CordeValle. No, not the hotdog thrower, the Stupid Award goes to Dan Diggins, head of security at the tournament, who blithely ventured, “It could have been worse. It could have been a chilli dog.” Sigh.

Certainly New Zealand is not exempt from acts of sublime stupidity. Government and local authorities standing on Papamoa Beach, doing little for days, staring a wrecked freighter and thinking “Gee, I wonder if it will leak oil?” is one of the worst cases in recent weeks.

Christchurch people who staunchly advocate rebuilding large wrecked stone buildings that, in one of the ceaseless aftershocks, are prone to again fall on people and kill them are exhibiting symptoms of endemic stupidity. Speaking of that, anything involving the Act Party or the words Don and Brash in the same sentence appears to evoke an aura of stupidity.

To quote Forrest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does.”