Fools

“Fool me once, shame on, shame on you... Fool me—can't get fooled again.”

One of the few things I remember learning in grade school was about April Fools' Day. My understanding of it was that it was a day on which people came up to you and said stupid things that weren't true. If you believed them, that meant you were a fool. I found this confusing: weren't they the fools, i.e., the people who said the stupid things in the first place? And when someone told you something that sounded relatively plausible, shouldn't you believe them? I just didn't get it.

For years, I dismissed the importance of April Fools' Day, which seemed like a minor, somewhat annoying holiday at best. But recently I have come to realize that for most Americans, it has served us well as a training ground for what would turn out to be the rest of our lives. Though I didn't appreciate it back then, April Fools' Day is probably the single most important factor in the development of our postmodern sense of humor, based as it is on the dissemination of false information.

In the past, I never found false information particularly funny, though others clearly did. Example: once during a college party at which someone was cooking a vast quantity of spaghetti (the only thing anyone in college knows how to cook), my friend Gary said something about the Indi 500.

“What's that?” I foolishly asked. Gary said that the Indi 500 was a race in which a large group of Indians ran around a track. “Really?” I said.

A roomful of college guys collapsed with laughter at my idiocy.

I just scratched my head. I couldn't care less what the Indi 500 was, and I didn't see what was funny about saying something that wasn't true that someone else believed.

Now, however, as an avid fan of The Onion and The Daily Show , I finally understand. False information and its cousin, fake news, are a riot. Thank you, April Fools' Day!

It is this appreciation of our April tradition and the spreading tentacles of its barbed wit that has led me to finally understand and value the wacky sense of humor of the Bush administration. For a long time, as with April Fool's Day, I just didn't get it. But when you take a number of the fun facts they have perpetuated and place them in context, 1 it turns out that they are absolutely hilarious.

Here are just a few of the rib-tickling gags the Bush team has foisted on us:

•Repeatedly suggesting that the war in Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and then claiming that they'd never said that. Hysterical!

• Claiming that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that he had sought to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Niger (the famous “sixteen words”) when it wasn't true. How funny is that!

• Telling the public, as Cheney did on “Meet the Press” in March 2003, that we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq. That Cheney! What a kidder!

• Saying, as Bush did about the war, also in March 2003, “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure.” Hahahahahaha!

• And who can forget “Mission accomplished!” I laughed till my sides ached.

Just when I thought the whole thing couldn't get any funnier, I read the latest article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker about the Bush Administration's new policy of “Redirection.” 2 Apparently, the Bush administration, or more accurately, Cheney's office, has adopted a new strategy: because they are now so worried about our latest enemy, Iran, the U.S. has teamed up with our good friends the Saudis and we are going to back Sunni extremists. As Hersh puts it, we have already “taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

So let me get this straight: we're now backing Al Queda sympathizers in the War on Terror.

Too, too funny!

Of course, all the people who have been killed or wounded in Iraq and their families probably don't find this at all amusing. But wait—maybe all those deaths and maimings were fake, too! Like the moon landing, which everyone knows was done in a film studio in the desert, perhaps the entire Iraq war has been one crazy spoof. After all, we almost never see news footage of dead American soldiers being brought home, let alone thousands of dead Iraqis—maybe it never happens!

Of course, Barbara Bush has seemed not to question the veracity of the Iraq casualties, but merely their importance: as she said to Diane Sawyer on March 18, 2003, “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it's going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” 3

You'd think that the president's own mother would be in on the joke, but perhaps she is so out of the loop that she didn't realize that the entire war has been one big fraternity prank staged by her motley-clad son.

I could go on citing example after example of the web of fictions spun by the industrious Bush team and their hilarious aftermaths, but suffice it to say—I get it. Move over Borat—we have been PUNK'D.

How is it that I (obviously, if we think back to the Indi 500 episode, a credulous individual by nature) have managed to figure out the vast scale of the Bush-Cheney prank when everyone else seems to have taken them seriously or, more often in the news media, ignored entirely some of the strange disparities between what they have said and done and the material facts of the matter?

Well, it's the only explanation, isn't it? If it wasn't all a big freaking joke, then why would Seymour Hersh's discoveries about the administration's new policy not have been headline news? Why haven't Bush and Cheney been called to account by Congress and the media for all their false narratives, their cherry-picked data, their unethical practises, their obviously impeachable offenses?

The answer is clear: it's all a gag, and the joke is on us. April Fools!

Footnotes:

1 — As Frank Rich has done in his New York Times column on the four-year anniversary of the war in Iraq, “The Ides of March 2003,” March 18, 2007: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html. See also E.J. Dionne, “Rewriting the Record,” The Washington Post, September 10, 2004: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10272-2004Sep9.html

2 — “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s New Policy Benefiting our Enemies in the War on Terrorism?”, March 5, 2007: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh

3 — Quoted in Rich, “The Ides of March 2003.”

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