Rock Island

by Bill Etem

culture has dumb-asses portrayed as ubiquitous. But beware of misleading rhetoric and facile images from the popular culture! Recall George C. Scott in Patton. It might make for a better war movie to have a tough talking actor say that ‘no poor dumb son-of-a-bitch every helped his country by dying for it’, and that you help your country win wars ‘by making the other poor dumb son-of-a-bitch die for his country’, etc., etc. But this is all Hollywood make-believe. The people being referred to as ‘poor dumb son-of-bitches’ are actually people with very powerful minds. They might be adept or they might be woefully slow at cultivating their powerful minds to their full potential, but they are certainly not ‘poor dumb sons-of-bitches’.

  Mark Twain wrote about this Jewish man who was employed to deliver the U.S. mail. His friend put up $1200 bond in order for him to get the job. A clerical mistake was made. He was supposed to have been paid $400 per year but the Jewish guy mistakenly signed a contract to deliver the mail, for one entire year. at a salary of $4. The U.S. government, instead of correcting the mistake, held him to the contract he signed. He had to deliver the mail, for an entire year, walking 30 miles every day, for $4, or else his friend would forfeit the $1200 bond. Years later Congress corrected the mistake, but Twain was still incensed with Congress because it cheated the man out of $13 when it tried to make amends. Yes, certainly, there are people who act, as the French say, in the manner of le dumb-ass. But a person who acts in the manner of a dumb-ass is not a proven, certified, bona fide, inveterate, dyed-in-the-wool dumb-ass. He might be a genius who is merely a little slow to reach his genius potential. People of the 19th century believed in the existence of actual, bona fide dumb-asses: therefore they were subscribers to Classical Dumb-Ass Theory. In the 21st century, advocates of Revisionist, or Post-Modern, Dumb-Ass Theory, insist that dysfunctional parenting leads to dysfunctional kids who grow up to be dysfunctional adults who raise dysfunctional kids who grow to raise more dysfunctional kids - so the key, the revisionists insist, is to re-train the parents and the kids so they wise up, so we can break the dumb-ass chain which drags people down to the depressing level of the dumb-ass, and then the genius of everyone will bloom. Those of us who labor in Dumb-Ass Theory re-train people with various techniques. Like a mechanic, you have to open up the hood, you have to open up people’s heads and get in there and start turning the right wrenches on the right nuts and bolts to get people’s busted brains working right.

  The defenders of Classical Dumb-Ass Theory see the Post-Modernists as either harmless or obnoxious dreamers. And of course Hunza, Kopecki and Taylor wrote the definitive work, the supreme masterpiece of Classical Dumb-Ass Theory over 50 years ago. Building proof upon proof in 3 elegant imaginary volumes, their slightly dated yet still incomparable tour de force, that great imaginary work in Classical Dumb-Ass Scholarship, Dumb-Ass Bastards (1961, University of Wisconsin at Elk Mound Press) should be read by everyone with a brain in their heads. Their scholarship is impeccable at every turn as the authors explain the evidence against dumb-ass fool after dumb-ass fool in their breathless yet immaculate style. You would have had to have been alive at the time those volumes were first published to feel the ground shake beneath your shoes, as Hunza’s, Kopecki’s and Taylor’s manifesto sent violent tremors through the intelligentsia of the pre-Vietnam epoch. Yet, perhaps not unsurprisingly, even the prodigious scholarship of Hunza, Kopecki and Taylor was insufficient to lift them out of their antiquated premises - trapped as they were in their marriage to Classical Dumb-Ass Theory - wedded to their a priori assumptions that dumb-asses positively do exist. In Revisionist Dumb-Ass Theory one is certainly not a Dumb-Ass even if one clings to some idiocy, because, even if one is slow upstairs, nevertheless, one is just a genius who is just a tardy in attaining his / her full genius potential.

  The reader is perhaps sophisticated enough to not be put off by the fact that the 3 volume masterpiece Dumb-Ass Bastards from Hunza, Kopecki and Taylor doesn’t actually exist, nevertheless, its existence is easy enough to imagine, and therefore it is crass to protest the use of that imaginary work. We don’t say that books which use imaginary numbers, that is, books which make use of the equation i = √ -1 are works of fiction because they use imaginary numbers. Look, it is a fact that √ -1 does not exist! No real number multiplied by itself equals -1! And yet this non-existent thing is very useful in many areas of Electrical Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering, Fluid Dynamics, Pure and Applied Mathematics, Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, General Relativity etc., - recall Minkowski’s and Lorentz’s use of imaginary numbers to formulate the transformation equations which explain those amazing upshots of Mathematical Physics- namely time dilation, the twin paradox, and the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction - which must needs result from the fact that the velocity of light is invariant - it remains the same regardless if the light source is moving toward you at any velocity or moving away from you at any velocity - as established in Michelson’s and Morley’s celebrated experiment. Whenever you want to rotate a complex number - which is vector-like - by 90 degrees in counterclockwise fashion you simply multiply that number by i. And yet i does not exist! One might consult Lawden’s An Introduction to Tensor Calculus and Relativity to see how the Lorentz Transformations are derived by the use of imaginary numbers should one want to look an introductory text before one scrutinizes the original papers of Lorentz, Einstein, Fitzgerald, Weyl etc. For those who want to consult introductory texts on the derivation of the Lorentz Transformations in ways which do not use imaginary numbers I would direct them to Kay’s Tensor Calculus (Schaum’s, p. 177), see also Gautreau’s and Savin’s Modern Physics (Schaum’s, pp. 12-38).

  So, since it is OK to use imaginary numbers in non-fiction mathematics and science books, therefore, it is OK to cite, in books in the genre of polemical non-fiction, imaginary authorities who write great imaginary masterpieces, such as the imaginary geniuses Professors Hunza, Kopecki and Taylor - the authors of the 3 volume imaginary masterpiece Dumb-Ass Bastards - 1961, from the imaginary University of Wisconsin at Elk Mound Press- to help one explain the complexity of a universe full of paradoxical phenomena, provided of course the reader is informed that one is citing great imaginary genius authorities.

  Yes, moving on, August Ferdinand Möbius entitled his celebrated work on quaternions: Der barycentrische Calcül, ein neues Huelfsmittel zur analytischen Behandlung der Geometry darstellt und insbesondere auf die Bildung neuer Classen von Aufgaben und die Entwickelung mehrerer Eigenschaften der Kegelschnitte angewendet - So you‘re probably thinking that anyone who writes a math book titled Der barycentrische Calcül, ein neues Huelfsmittel zur analytischen Behandlung der Geometry darstellt und insbesondere auf die Bildung neuer Classen von Aufgaben und die Entwickelung mehrerer Eigenschaften der Kegelschnitte angewendet - must be at least something of a dumb-ass. Perhaps he was, I don’t know, but perhaps it is more likely that he was merely an eccentric yet very bright mathematician. Name me some German mathematicians who weren’t eccentric. The German mathematician Felix Klein, in his famous Erlanger Programm of 1872, defines a geometry as ‘a theory of the invariants of a transformation group’, which I’m sure you will agree is an excellent beginning but it is very far from being a satisfactory all-encompassing summation of the whole geometrical-transform-invariant subject. We want to put everything on a sound and rigorous footing, otherwise we will have to work from piecemeal examples rather than from a hierarchy of infallible guiding precepts. And of course one must be very careful to not say careless people are dumb-asses! Geniuses can make mistakes, and lots of them! Look at the great French nouvelle vague director Jean-Pierre Melville and look at those botched scenes he constructed in Un flic, the ones where he uses a toy helicopter and a toy train to simulate a real helicopter and a real train. He made a thorough botch of things in a few scenes but, nevertheless, he is still a great film director and he’s still a shining star in the pantheon of the French Cinema. And look at Kiss Me Deadly, with Ra
lph Meeker starring as Mike Hammer, and starring a young and nice-looking Cloris Leachman, who I suppose is most famous from those scenes in Young Frankenstein, where she isn’t so young and nice-looking, those scenes where the horses rear up and scream in terror every time her name in that movie, Frau Blucher, is pronounced, but don’t you think Kiss Me Deadly drags at times for a film which has some great stars in it - at least I think Meeker was great in that film - and which is a film which has all the ingredients for a great movie? John Sturgis’ Mystery Street, which is another one of the supreme film noir classics, never drags. Ralph Meeker, who I learned the other day was from Minneapolis, my home town, was in Teresa, a beautiful film directed by Fred Zinnemann. That guy who starred as the pimp in Bob Swami’s magnificent film about Parisian cops and gangsters, La Balance, played a cop in Zinnemann’s magnificent The Day of the Jackal. I found Zinnemann’s Julia starring Jane Fonda more or less