‘Sidd’ was short for Siddhartha, which should have been enough to clue me in…
Really, a hoax is a gift, and we should be thankful
I was quite taken in by a 1985 Sports Illustrated profile of Sidd Finch, a remarkable rookie pitcher picked up by the Mets. Sidd was a student of yoga and had spent time in Tibet, where he learned mystic arts that enabled him to pitch a 168 mph fast ball. For a few hours I lived in a more wonderful world, a world in which the delicate balances that make baseball such an exquisite game were about to be forever upended. But then I thought about it a little more, noticed the date of the issue, and realized I’d fallen prey to a hoax. April Fools, Angus.
When I was in high school, I was something of a patriot. I saluted the flag with zeal, applied to the Coast Guard Academy and here’s the weird part, I even felt a certain automatic respect for the President, congressmen, and other politicians. But as I got older I began to think about it, and eventually smelled a hoax… and never again have I labored under the tedious delusion that my government is inherently less odious than other governments in other times or places. Similarly, for longer than I care to admit, I vigorously maintained the curious belief that God himself had been captured with a net of doctrine, and that I and a few others were the ones who had sprung the trap, and as practical jokes go, that was harsh.
To be fooled, and to then realize one has been fooled, is a powerful and valuable experience, and one that we cannot choose for ourselves, for if we know we’re being fooled… then we’re not being fooled. Really, a hoax is a gift, and we should be thankful. To be fooled is to know in one’s gut that at least some of our beliefs are probably wrong, and to see through a hoax is some kind of enlightenment. For there are two parties to every hoax, and the biggest hoax of all is the illusion that we are separate from the divine.
To be fooled is not the same thing as being a fool, not quite. We can be deceived in this life, and do silly things in service of deception, and there’s still a way to keep our pride. All we have to do is keep asking, keep seeking, keep testing, and the day comes when we realize we’ve been had. And that’s when we teeter on the edge of being a fool, for now we have a choice. We can either laugh at ourselves, and the hoax we’ve fallen for, and maybe learn a little more about the Author of all hoaxes… or we can turn back, reenter delusion, and be a fool indeed.
So my challenge—and yours too, obviously—is to keep figuring out what it is I’m falling for now. Maybe, for example, the man on the TV is lying to me, or maybe my happiness is less dependent on the economy than I think. The fact is, I don’t know which of my beliefs are actually hoaxes, I just know that at least some of them definitely are.
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You already know the man on the TV is lying and that your happiness revolves around something other than economy. Maybe you are fooling yourself there, that the man on the TV is not lying and that money brings you happiness. Maybe the black and white of it all is a hoax, the very idea that there is an Author or there is not. The hoax is a hoax.
April Fools to you, too, Mr. Stocking.
cc
And to you, Mr. Childs.
It would seem to follow that whatever we’re most sure of is the Hoax…leading us all down the skepticism spiral.
Mmm, the Hoax: love the capitalization.
I fell for the Google “Autopilot” CADIE hoax, where they claimed to be implementing a new “lab” in Gmail where it automatically replies to emails in your “style”. A ludicrous idea, obviously, but the artificial intelligence possibilities of it sucked me in for a while, until I realized there was no where to click to “enable” this new “lab”.
I recommend checking it out: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html
It’s embarrassing to admit that I momentarily fell for it, seeing as how I read it on April Fool’s Day.
I also like the phrase “Also, I ate an entire shark while it was still alive.”
Another random note: I started listening to “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations” on audio tape by Al Franken during my commute today, and realized that not only is your sharp wit and often hilarious attention to irony remarkably similar to Franken’s, but the tone and enunciation of your voices are almost identical.
Identical?
Yes, with a capital “I”.