A high school classmate of mine once told me this story:
He is quite a smart fellow, but was unemployed at the time. All he did everyday was eat and sit around at home doing nothing. One day, he got hold of two of his friends and together they went out looking for excitement.
They stopped at the sewage ditch near a busy street corner, squatted, and looked down intently. In less than a minute, they were surrounded by five or six people looking over their heads. “What is it?” someone asked.
“Oh, a big rat . . . white as snow . . . this big!” The classmate of mine indicated with his hands.
“Look, its head has just come out!” His co-conspirators cheered on. Seven or eight heads craned to see.
“It’s drawn back, but will come out again.”
In less than ten minutes, the ditch was surrounded by several layers of people, those from the outside layers asking those of the inside layers:
“What is it?”
“What is it?”
“A white-haired rat . . . green-eyed . . . its tail two feet long.”
“Oh, my!”
At this point the classmate of mine and his co-conspirators withdrew from the scene quietly.
When they came back after wandering around for a while, the street corner next to the ditch was besieged with a thick, large crowd. The traffic jam was so bad that the whole place became a parking lot of long lines of busses and trucks, all honking like ravens.
“What’s going on?” the classmate of mine grabbed the hand of a man, who was craning hard to see, and asked.
“A huge rat.” The man broke free of his hand and squeezed into the thick crowd. Someone hollered from beside the sewage ditch: “Its head is coming out!”
Oh, what splendid stupidity!
(1981)