Stupid Shit People Used to Believe

I posted this a year ago today. It has been, by far, my most popular post, so I’d thought I’d revisit it again since we had so much fun with it last year.

Thanks for being here.

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Stupid Shit People Used to Believe

Somewhere on or around November 6^th of this year it came to me—once again—that people are really not that bright. I could use modifiers and say “some people aren’t bright” or “there are a few chowderheads among us who pull the push door” but what I really mean is humanity overall—we’re not that smart, collectively. We really aren’t, and much of our short history shows it. In the realm of religion alone there are enough blunders and misbeliefs to make me wonder how we ever crawled out of the caves. In the sciences, in the medical field, in pop-fucking-culture, we have gotten everything wrong, over and over again.

We really haven’t gotten better over the years either. Now we listen to conspiracy theories. We refuse to look up facts, or we stop looking when we get the facts that fit our already-formed beliefs. We’re pissed about the price of eggs so we hand the keys of the kingdom to the man who has all the chickens. There’s an information superhighway but it’s paved with misinformation, an alternate world where Kamala Harris performs sex-change operations at middle schools, and Hillary Clinton is STILL running that child-sex-slave ring from the basement of a pizza place in DC that doesn’t have a basement.

But, bless our collective hearts, I think it’s because we’re small, and scared, in the same way prehistoric man must have looked up at the stars and seen how big the universe really is. When the information is overwhelming, you hold onto what small thing you can because it makes you feel safe. You can control a little bit of the world by believing this thing. The edges don’t begin to unravel if you hold onto that belief, whatever it is—that there’s a heaven waiting for us, that someone will save us, that, in the end, it doesn’t matter what we do on earth. If we hold hard to the things we believe we won’t have to reevaluate. We won’t have to reconsider the ideas we subscribe to. We just have to keep believing, like a Journey song, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Here, then, is a list of some stupid shit people used to believe. I share these with you for hope. Most of these things we no longer believe in, which means we can learn. Hit in the face with the evidence enough times, eventually we come around, like a caveman slowly seeing his reflection from the fire on the wall of the cave, or someone realizing, around November 6^th or so, that everything they previously believed was bullshit.

1. Cigarettes are good for you

In the 1950s, everyone loved smoking. Teachers smoked in the classroom. People smoked on airplanes. You could buy cigarettes as a toddler. They gave cigarettes out at the dentist with the travel-size toothpaste. Doctors prescribed those motherfuckers for anxiety and weight loss and all kinds of shit.

Before he became president, Ronny Raygun told us cigarettes were good. He even shilled for Chesterfield, buying his friends and family cartons of cancer. Lots of people used to think cigarettes were good for you, or at least they received an assload of money to say so. Frank Sinatra also did commercials for Chesterfield, as did Rod Serling. John Wayne cut a commercial for Camel a decade before he delivered anti-smoking messages for the American Cancer Society. Cary Cooper liked Lucky Strikes, and Steve McQueen smoked Viceroys, so it makes sense everyone in my family smoked, as used to seeing it on TV as they were.

It also makes sense I spent 20 years smoking. My mother has smoked all her life, and her lungs sound like a vast empty cavern where the winds of time gather to bellow and blow. But everyone smoked in the 70s—there were buttcans inside Walmart and the grocery store. My brother and I bought our mother’s cigarettes when we could barely see over the gas station counter, and the people behind the counter would just hand them to us.

But we changed people’s minds about cigarettes because we made them seem dirty and disgusting. We made commercials about coughing away second-hand smoke. About all the dangers you are doing to your body, and despite the fact that some people still smoke, like my mother, age 74 now, still holding her little bit of comfort and control in the form of a cancer stick, we changed the way we view the act of smoking. Smokers are outcasts now. They have to stand outside to smoke at bars. My mother smokes on the front porch of her own house. She looks lonely there by herself, only smoke for company, so I sit with her when I visit, mother and son wreathed in smoke like people who can’t learn.

2. Being left-handed is evil

My grandparents—good people—whipped my mother when she tried to use her left hand. Her elementary school teachers swatted her with a ruler. They forced her to relearn how to do something she did naturally. This wasn’t the year 1500. This was the 1950s, those halcyon days Republicans are always harkening back to, when my mother was beaten for being who she was.

See, in the 50s ignorant people thought being left-handed was somehow wrong, just like ignorant people right now think being trans is somehow wrong. My grandparents later regretted what they had done—they learned better, and quit listening to ignorant people.

My advice to you is to go and do likewise.

3. Vampires were the cause of mysterious illnesses

In the 1800s, when Aunt Suzie was wasting away with tuberculosis, some dunderheads believed it was the work of vampires. That highly supernatural beings would sneak into your house at night and suck away on Aunt Suzie, causing her condition. Tuberculosis was a “wasting sickness” and people watched their loved ones wasting away. Since they didn’t know about disease, they assumed something was sucking the victim’s life-force from them.

This makes me wonder if insurance companies would honor claims of vampires. Maybe if they thought people were being attacked by Bela Lugosi they would cough up some insurance money. I doubt it though. They would probably claim having blood was a pre-existing condition for vampire attacks, therefore you, the blood owner, were responsible for any and all blood-related diseases, up to and including vampires.

The whole thing seems silly now, in the year of our Lord 2024, until I think about the number of people who believe prayer works—that there are supernatural entities waiting to save you, as long as you subscribe to their dogma first.

4. Carrots give you superhuman vision

As a former history major, I love this one. Check this out: during World War Two, the English had radar, and the Germans did not. English radar could detect German planes before they crossed the English Channel, giving the English a huge advantage, and since they did not want the Germans to learn about radar, they came up with carrots.

“In 1940, RAF night fighter ace, John Cunningham, nicknamed “Cat’s Eyes,” was the first to shoot down an enemy plane using [radar]. He’d later rack up an impressive total of 20 kills—19 of which were at night. . .The Ministry told newspapers that the reason for their success was because pilots like Cunningham ate an excess of carrots.”

Further, English citizens were implored to plant “victory gardens,” since the rationing of food made supplies short.

“Citizens regularly tuned into radio broadcasts like “The Kitchen Front,” a daily, five-minute BBC program that doled out hints and tips for new recipes. According to Stolarczyk, the Ministry of Food encouraged so much extra production of carrots that by 1942, it was looking at 100,000 ton surplus.”

There are two lessons here. The first is about propaganda. The second is about the power of production.

5. Vitamin C cures colds

I’m going to get hate mail from this one, but Vitamin C doesn’t cure colds. It may—may—slightly reduce a cold’s duration. Maybe, a tiny little bit.

Here’s how it started: sometime in the 1960s, scientist Linus Pauling started taking high doses of Vitamin C. Pauling said he began to feel “livelier and healthier.”

“In particular, the severe colds I had suffered several times a year all my life no longer occurred.”

In 1970 Pauling published a book titled Vitamin C and the Common Cold, where he encouraged Americans to consume 3,000 mg of Vitamin C daily.

Pauling’s research and methods were immediately critiqued. Scientists repeatedly found that colds progress much the same way regardless of what mega-pills you’re taking.

But Pauling’s research was accepted outside the scientific community. People started buying more Vitamin C, and in bigger doses. Then, of course, as happens in America, the marketers got involved, and, well, you can’t put the teethpaste back in the tube. Ad agencies began to extol on the “cold-killing” qualities of Vitamin C, and suddenly every suburban housewife knew exactly what to do when little Timmy came down with the sniffles.

People still tell me to take Vitamin C when I’m sick. They think I’m stupid when I tell them it doesn’t do anything. They look at me like I’ve hurt them, and I don’t like to hurt people, so now I tell people I am taking loads and loads of Vitamin C.

As a suppository.

“It works better that way,” I tell them.

6. Tomatoes are poisonous

People in Europe were afraid of tomatoes for 200 years, which makes me think of that old B movie classic “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” Maybe tomatoes came alive and attacked all of Europe, like Napolean did.

But people actually died from eating tomatoes. They got sick and keeled over because many households in Europe used pewter plates, which are made from lead. The high acid content in tomatoes leeched lead from the pewter and poisoned people, kind of like all the microplastics we consume from food packaging.

Potatoes were also banned, for similarly stupid reasons. When potatoes were brought to Europe from the Incan Empire in the 15- and 1600s, Europeans didn’t trust them, making me wonder what causes someone to not trust a vegetable:

“Some clergymen suggested God did not intend for potatoes to be eaten because the Bible did not acknowledge them. Botanists correctly identified spuds as belonging to the nightshade family of plants, which can contain a substantial amount of toxins that are inactivated by cooking, leading to a misguided link between potatoes and witchcraft or devil worship. And finally, herbalists noticed a similarity between the way potatoes look and the appearance of the hands of those suffering from leprosy and wrongly believed potatoes could cause the disease, a chronic bacterial infection that was epidemic in Europe for many centuries and didn't start to decline until the 1600s.”

All this reminds me of how, in the early 2000s, some Americans tried to change the name of french fries to Freedom Fries. This, of course, wasn’t because of french fries themselves. Not their high calorie content or high cholesterol content or the fact that they’re mostly made by high schoolers working for minimum wage.

It was because France opposed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. During United Nations Security Council meetings, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs made it clear France would neither support nor participate in the proposed invasion of Iraq.

In response, thousands of Americans poured their French wine out. They refused to eat french fries until the name was changed to Freedom Fries, showing those stupid Frenchies. . .

Sorry, I don’t know what we were supposed to be showing the Frenchies. I guess just how actually stupid Americans are.

7. Board games are evil

If you’re my age there’s a good chance you’ve summoned a demon, either accidentally by Ouija Board, or on purpose in Dungeons and Dragons. You also know, if you’re my age and have summoned a demon, that a whole lot people got bent way out of shape about both of those board games, the same way some Christian families won’t let their kids read Harry Potter because of all the evil sorcery.

So let me set the scene, because there’s a lot of history and pop-culture surrounding this, including Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters, a novel that was made into a shitty for-TV film starring a young Tom Hanks, and Dungeons and Dragons itself, which is really just a lot of math and a lot of imagination. There’s the rise of the Religious Right and the Satanic Panic they brought with them, the unfounded claims of Satanism everywhere in the country. There were serial killers roaming the interstates and kidnappings everywhere and the mass media did not even try to substantiate fact from fiction, so basically we were about where we are now in the stupid category—conspiracy theories everywhere, and everyone scared enough to do silly and futile things, like ban board games, or books.

But I maintain that the greatest evil of those times was Monopoly. I’ve never played that fucking game without someone flipping the board over because some other asshole owned every piece of property and had put up hotels, leaving the board-flipper no other choice but to rage-quit. Even then I knew only an asshole would knock down four fucking houses to put up a luxury hotel.

I claim we would all be better off if we had broken out the Ouija boards and the D&D and thrown Monopoly in the fucking trash. The Ouija board forced people to work together to find out if there are any spirits in the room. D&D taught groups to work together as well. Maybe they were fighting imaginary bugbears and kobolds, but I maintain it is better than trying to become a scumlord who bankrupts all his friends just so he can own everything.

We have real-life billionaires who do that, and we damn sure don’t need to teach any more kids that concept.

8. Drilling holes in someone’s head will release the evil spirits

This was called “trepanning” and honestly I think some people could use this today. There are some people whose heads need drilled into to let the evil spirits out.

9. Uteruses could move around

“In the ancient medical world it was believed that a 'wandering womb' caused suffocation and death. Menstruation and pregnancy were thought to make women the weaker sex, both physically and mentally. By the late nineteenth century, it was deemed scientifically proven that women’s biology made them less rational than men, unfit to participate in many areas of public life.”

Men thought women’s wombs “moved around.” Jesus wept. I don’t even have anything smartass to say to that, except that maybe men should no longer be in charge of women’s bodies because we don’t know shit about them, and we don’t listen. Or ask.

When trains were invented, men believed women who traveled by train were “likely to suffer from some form of uterine flexion or dislocation.”

You know, because of the wandering womb all women have.

10. Periods were evil:

This really belongs with the previous entry, but in the 13th century, Albertus Magnus, a German scientist and philosopher, wrote a book called De Secretis Mulierum (Women’s Secrets), which focused on the "retention of the menses" and the calamities that could arise from such a scenario. One of his beliefs was that those nearing menopause were toxic because they had had so many periods in their lifetime. Simply put, more periods equals more poison. It was thought that menopausal individuals were so venomous they could kill a child simply by looking at them.

I want to make fun of this, but it’s too close to the way women are treated today in the medical field. Not-listened to, talked over, ignored. They’ve been misdiagnosed, mistreated, rights taken away, to the point I bet some women would welcome the ability to kill with a look.

11. The earth is the center of the solar system

It is not. And America is not the center of the world, or the leader of the world, or the most-Christian nation in the world. Those are not things we want this country to be. What we want this country to be is kind. I don’t care how Christian you are if you are unkind. I don’t care what Bible verses you can recite if you treat other people like shit, I don’t care what catechism or creeds you subscribe to.

Jesus said love one another—if you aren’t doing that, you’re the center of your own solar system, drifting somewhere in the darkness, just making up your own dumb shit to believe.

12. The divine rights of kings

These fucking fuckers way back when believed they could do no wrong. I mean this literally. Kings were divine. If they said something wrong, that became the new truth. If they said it was raining buckets, grab your umbrella. If they said it was pissing poisonous potatoes, grab an ever-loving shovel.

And listen, if you were just born, maybe you don’t know the kind of shit kings get up to when there are no power checks. No balances, no board of overseers, just absolute power corrupting absolutely.

The Romans threw people to the lions for the laughter of the rich. They flooded the Coliseum so they could hold naval battles. Caligula may or may not have made his horse a senator, but he did fuck his sisters. He instituted a reign of terror through arbitrary arrest, and sent Roman soldiers to attack the sea with their swords, eventually claiming victory over Neptune himself.

Ivan the Terrible massacred an entire city because he didn’t trust its inhabitants. Vlad Tepes, from whom Dracula stories arose, impaled 20,000 of his enemies. He rammed giant wooden stakes up their asses and left them to rot in the weather.

Even without the divine rights of kings, we’ve committed terrible atrocities. In this country we’ve murdered and misplaced millions of Native Americans. We enslaved Africans for hundreds of years, then oppressed their descendants for a hundred and fifty more. We worked people to death in the factories. We worked people to death in the fields. Even now we let insurance companies cancel life-saving care. We let them suck what little life we have left when we are suffering from sickness. Everyday there’s a new atrocity at loose in the world, all of it caused by money, and the greed of men. All our grievances going back forever. Our list of assaults is long and varied, while our memories are short, and self-selective.

But one thing we have learned, those of us who have studied history, is that you don’t put small men in positions of power. History is replete with angry men. With terrible men who use their terrible power for terrible ends. It is replete with lazy kings as well, and sometimes they do the most damage. The French had a phrase for their fat asses: Roi fainéant, which means do-nothing king. Lazy king. I imagine a king like that lying around watching TV. Eating McDonald’s and angry-tweeting about the peasants calling him lazy. I imagine a king like that would follow his worst impulses. I imagine him holding onto power. Attacking the press. His enemies. American citizens.

History has given me lots of things to imagine. I just hope we aren’t repeating any of them.

13. Trickle-down economics

I know this doesn’t work because I’ve been waiting for money to trickle down since 1984. If money trickled down my parents would be rich. They did everything they were supposed to do—they went to work and raised their little family and then they waited for all the good things to come to them.

They’re still waiting, because the trickle-down never trickled down. Instead, corporations bought back stock. They gave bonuses to their CEOs, or they shipped their factories overseas so they could pay foreign workers less money. Many of our biggest companies don’t even manufacture anything anymore—they just move money around because they can make more in market fluctuation and speculation than they can actually creating a product and selling it to consumers. Or they engage in planned obsolescence—the product is designed to die right about the time the warranty runs out, which also pollutes the earth with cellphones and old computers and cars that can’t drive.

The truth is, our economy is killing us. We’re shitting all over the planet so we can have fast food and cheap but stylish clothing. So we can have smartphones and the internet and all the things the internet tells us we need to have. Now it’s hard to even eat healthily. It’s hard to afford health care, and it is getting harder. We let people just fucking die in this country because they can’t afford to live, and we can’t find our way to help them without hurting the profits we so desire.

My uncle never told anyone he was dying. He knew, months before the end, that he had lung cancer, but he never went to the hospital. On his death bed he told his brother he had kept quiet because the family would have forced him to seek treatment, and he knew he didn’t have enough money to undergo the battle. He had insurance but even with it the treatment would have wiped out his life savings, which he wanted to leave to his daughter.

She died less than a year later from her own form of cancer. The only comfort I can find in all this is that he died first, so he didn’t have to bury his daughter.

14. Jesus wants you to be rich

What Bible-made-from-human-skin are you reading? I really want you to answer this. What backwards-ass Bible are you reading, because somebody’s lying to you.

Jesus was a radical. He believed in forgiving his enemies. He believed in overthrowing the capitalist system. He believed in welcoming foreigners, and loving thy neighbor, even if—especially if—they were different than you.

So I ask again, what brothertrucking Bible tells you to gather as much greed as you can? While we’re at it, what tome tells you to hate people? What translation says to discriminate against, criminalize, and terrorize the LGBT community? Did Jesus stutter when he told us to love one another? To treat others as you would have them treat you? That the greatest of these is love?

Jesus, in the Bible I read, would have abhorred what this country has become, putting God and Empire together. Worshipping the golden calf, elevating the idols of greed above his name and his words and his deeds. Joel Osteen can suck green dogshit through his pearly white teeth. That asshole didn’t open his church when Hurricane Whateverthefuckitsnamewas hit Houston, nor did he open his 40-million-dollar home. He left people to drown. And seeing as how there’s a biblical story about a flood to show us the way, Osteen must have seen the people of Houston as sinners not worth saving, left to drown in the wake of an angry God.

Prosperity gospel is a concept created by men who love gold more than God. I know it, and you know it, deep down where it matters. Shame on the cathedral that created it, shame on the country that houses it, and shame on those who believe it.

15. That there’s no hope

I get it. It’s fucking dark out there. I’ve been in the darkness the last few days.

All through history there have been men with no hope. Men who stood and stared at the stars, sure they were falling. That the world was ending, that the darkness was descending, that the final days had arrived. That mankind had taken its last gasp of breath.

But listen, there are always some stubborn fuckers out there fighting the forces of corruption. There’s always a light in the darkness, there are always people who will stand up for what they believe in, and what they believe in is that all people are created equal. They believe in love, no matter what name they call God. They believe we can build a better world if we can get everyone on board. If we let go of greed and grab hold of one another. Maybe we’ll need to slap a few slow learners, but there are those of us who still hold hard to the belief that we can, finally, embrace those ideas we have long claimed to be self-evident.