What You Can Learn From a Village Idiot

Before I went off to college, I spent three summers working in a small town in Missouri–even smaller than the county seat I grew up in–harvesting fescue.  

 

Rush hour. 

Fescue is a type of grass commonly used for lawns in the cooler regions of the United States, that is, from the Canadian border to approximately the latitude of the Mason-Dixon line.  Farmers bring their harvested fescue seed to buyers who weigh it and test it for moisture content, and once a price has been agreed on, the seed is dumped into “windrows” in open fields to dry.  When dry, the seed is cleaned, bagged and sold.

 

Windrows:  Not very exciting.

The work is hot, dirty and hard.  The hours are long, as the seed must be harvested when it is ready, and all at once.  Not surprisingly, America’s best and brightest do not yearn for careers in the grass seed industry.

 

As a result, the work is done by young men who have yet to acquire any marketable skills, and older men who never did.  That is how I came to work alongside two village idiots–as an equal.

 

The most common use of the term “village idiot” today is to insult people whom we disagree with and thus believe to be fools.  A true village idiot is different from a fool, however.  A village idiot does not habitually do foolish things, or wear a foolish grin.  A village idiot is a person whose age exceeds his mental development, but who is capable of living and working within a community of people with normal intelligence where the demands of life are few; village idiots exist because such communities exist.  There are no village idiots in Manhattan not because there are no idiots there, but because it is not a village, and a feeble-minded person on that island cannot survive outside an institution.

As befits someone whose mental age is that of a child, a village idiot is unlikely to hold opinons on political or social issues.  A village idiot may have absorbed some basic theology, however, and appreciate simple art and musical forms.  Most importantly, a village idiot is often capable of loyalty and hard work, diligently and proficiently performed, to the extent of his limited powers.

You can learn a great deal from a village idiot, but there are many things that a village idiot will not teach you; the low cunning, for example, that an itinerant carnival worker is capable of; the self-conscious foolishness that a young man will put on to win the attention of a girl; the improvidence of a gambler or a man too fond of drink.

What a village idiot can teach you is a certain fortitude and resignation that will be useful to recall, perhaps many years later, in those moments when you find yourself staring into the middle distance, wondering what exactly is the point of your work and your life, all the getting and spending by which, Wordsworth said, we lay waste our powers.  For the village idiot, the getting and the spending, and consuming what is bought with that spending, is all there is, and in most cases that is more than enough.

 

This is not to suggest that a village idiot is incapable of a sly sense of what a more learned man might call dramatic irony.  In the seed plant where I worked one of the means by which we lightened the tedium of our days was to cut “cat’s asses” with the forklift.  For those who have never heard of this maneuver, a cat’s ass is a small hole within a larger hole formed by skidding to a stop on a surface–an snowy parking lot or in this case a warehouse floor covered with grain–so that your vehicle spins around.  The inner wheel forms a small circle, the outer wheel a larger circle around it–a cat’s ass.  You can break the monotony of a day of driving back and forth between a boxcar and a bagging operation this way, but as you can imagine, the capitalists who invest money in fork lifts and seed plants frown upon their use for amusement.

Our village idiot, George, was not allowed to drive the forklift.  Among the “town boys”, I was the only one who did so.  One day when the plant owner left his office to check on our progress he noticed a cat’s ass on the floor, and was understandably angered.

“Who the hell,” he asked in his Kentucky accent, “has been cuttin’ cat’s asses back here?”

The non-idiots in the group were silent, as was George–at first.  Then he spoke.

“I ain’t gonna say, but it was one of them town boys.”

The owner looked at me with disgust, said “Don’t do it again”, and walked off.

The lesson an idiot taught me that day?  There is no need to play the fool–regardless of the gifts we’re born with, life makes fools of us all.

Copyright 2007, Con Chapman