Stupidity Prime

I’m a great fan of expertise. I mean, I love to see someone who is just tops in their field at work.

That includes stupidity.

No. Really. If you’re going to do something stupid, well, by Golly, by George, and by Gum, it should be just positively brain-rattlingly stupid. No little silly dimwittedness of the sort that Mother Used To Make. No. It ought to be devastatingly dumb. I mean, in the kiloton class of sheer brain-deadedness.

Warning: Extreme Stupidity Ahead

For example...

In case you missed it, there was a remarkable story out of Baltimore on Monday, June 22, 2020. It seems that a restaurant in that city denied entrance to a mother and her son (he was about nine) on the grounds that the boy was not properly dressed. He had on, you see, shorts, a t-shirt, and athletic shoes. They were also African-American.

The kicker? A white boy of the same age, wearing pretty much the same clothing, had just been served.

The African-American mother used her phone to video her interaction with a member  of the restaurant’s staff...and posted the video to the web. Naturally, it all hit the fan and the owner of the restaurant, Atlas Restaurant Group, had to go into serious damage control mode and has been apologizing like an Evangelical homophobic minister caught in a four-way with two himbos, a hardhat, and a thirty gallon drum of cream cheese. The herby kind.

Now, if you haven’t seen the video, you ought to give it a look (links below), because it is a work of art. In it, the restaurant employee achieves a level of dimness that must be seen to believed. It is a virtuoso performance. One for the ages! The man is unbending, seemingly smug, and utterly unconcerned about the fact that his every word is being recorded for posterity.

You find yourself wanting to take the guy to one side and saying, Dude... dude!...don’t you get it?  That video is going to be on Facebook before the end of the day. It’s going to be all over the world. You’re going to have your fifteen minutes of fame...as Raging Asshole of the Month. And, oh, btw, you just got fired. Maybe not right now. But soon.

To give the poor chap the benefit of a doubt, maybe it wasn’t his idea. Maybe he was just following orders from his manager. But he was still dumb as a box of rocks to do it and he is still going to take the fall for it, whoever was responsible.

So, really, really stupid...

But also, there’s a point here. We are now in an age when you must assume that any interaction is going to be recorded. Which is scary for all of us. But, also, anyone ... particularly anyone dealing with customers who may be members of minorities...is going to have to assume that anything...anything at all!...which remotely looks like racism is going to be seen. And, it will be fatal for your career.

And this is going to be hard for us to learn. (I include myself in that.  Though I’ll do my best.) What worries me, though, is not head waiters...no matter how pompous or foolish...but others, who may be much harder to teach.

Like the military, like the police, like...indeed...

The president.

*

Until next time, onward and upward.



Sources:

“Baltimore restaurant apologizes to Black woman, son after denying them service over clothes,” USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/23/baltimores-atlas-restaurant-sorry-denying-service-black-boy/3240818001/

“A restaurant denied service to a Black boy for his clothes, but video shows a White boy, dressed similarly, was allowed,” CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/23/us/ouzo-bay-baltimore-restaurant-denies-service-to-black-boy-trnd/index.html

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About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

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