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The People of Moronia

Creator: Eleanor Rowland Wembridge (author)
Date: January 1926
Publication: The American Mercury
Source: Available at selected libraries

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IT WAS the custom during the Middle Ages, when human nerves and tastes were more robust than they are now, to entertain one's guests with the antics of dwarfs and cripples. The philosophy behind the court jester evidently was this: If a person is so absurd as to choose to be awkward and misshapen, he deserves to be laughed at. We have now passed that stage of humor, and such things as palsy or a malfunctioning pituitary gland are no longer considered amusing. But the individual with the crippled intelligence is still an object of laughter or wrath among us, and gets both in about equal doses.

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The current idea that a person is either normally intelligent or a sheer imbecile is of course as untrue as the notion that one must be either perfectly healthy or sick unto death. There are all stages of broken arches, rheumatism, indigestion, and pain in the back, and there are all stages of skill or lack of skill at reasoning, and all sorts of facilities with numbers and words. Only by the sum total of these aptitudes and defects can we judge the individual. If the total is just a trifle too meagre for the complex demands of modern life, and cannot be made to develop further, then we confront morons, or the border-line feeble-minded, or the dull, or the retarded. All these terms designate different varieties of weak but often likable individuals. They are doomed to carry loads too heavy for them.

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In exposing their mental helplessness and the grotesque gropings of their minds, I somehow feel that I am on the humane level of those medieval worthies who may have said "Isn't the staggering of that paralyzed boy a scream? Let's chase him and have a good laugh when he trips." That the mental operations of those of low intelligence are absurd there can be no doubt. But the defense which seems the most appropriate for them, when one more job has been lost because of stupidity, or one more arrest made because of suggestibility, or one more child got into its coffin by gullibility, is the speech of Shylock with but a few words changed: "I am a moron. Hath not a moron eyes? Hath not a moron hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same Winter and Summer as the intelligent are? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die ? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that, -- the villainy you teach us, we will execute, and it shall go hard, but we will better the instruction." No words could better fit the moron, who must lead a citizen's life without a citizen's equipment, and the sombre concluding threat is no less ominous because no moron would have the wit to make it.

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From which preamble I descend to the concrete fact of Flora's wedding.

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II

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Chuck had met Flora on the street and said "How about a show, Blondey?" to which she had replied, "O Boy!" With this introduction matters had gone far before she even knew his last name -- a name which she was now to assume under a wedding bell of Easter lilies. We social workers did not approve of the wedding any more than we had approved of others about which our opinion had been asked. But both high contracting parties were of legal age, however low their mental ages might be (Flora's was between ten and eleven as it happened, and Chuck, who was very dull but not quite so feeble, scored a scant year higher), and they wanted to marry, so there was nothing to do but ring the wedding bells, turn on the "Lohengrin" record, throw rice and old shoes, and wait for the inevitable. Incidentally, let no one underestimate the value of an elaborate wedding for morons, if wedded they must be. The mere signing of a license is essentially too abstract and trivial a formality for those who cannot grasp the idea of law. It takes more than a scrap of paper to hold the family together after a quarrel. But if the veil is long enough, enough jokes are made by the best man, and enough shrieks uttered by the bridesmaids, the impression is made upon the dimly-endowed pair that something really important socially has taken place. They are helped thereby to remember that somehow the clergy and the police will see to it that the bride does not sell the household furniture behind her husband's back, and that he will not leave her with the rent to pay. So Flora, married Chuck on $20 a week, and they went to housekeeping in two furnished rooms.

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Flora had been getting $12 and her lunches as a dishwasher in a restaurant, but that could not continue for long. This aspect of the case, however, was not discussed very much, for Chuck seemed genuinely fond of his Flora, and was marrying her under no outside pressure. Ultimately therefore, Flora must budget his $20 a week to cover rent, food, clothes, movies, gas, tobacco, lipstick, chewing-gum -- and layette. To do this required addition, subtraction, and even multiplication, and these processes must be accurate and rapid enough to count the change before the peddler walked way with the extra dollar. Furthermore, a certain ability to use and to understand language was required, because the only callers at Flora's door would be agents for hosiery, vacuum cleaners, vanishing creams and cleaning fluids, veterans selling needles, and children raffling sofa pillows for a fair.

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