Stupid. Creative! But Stupid

Today I want to honor stupid creativity in the news.

I am a great fan of creativity. I especially enjoy stupid creativity. The things that the newsmakers I’m going to honor today have done are outstandingly, stupidly, creative.

To start with we have the Laotian government, which has recently been under pressure from the Thai government to repatriate and create homes for thousands of Hmong refugees that have been living in Thailand since Laos fell to the communists in 1975. The Laotian government has brilliantly, creatively, responded to Thailand’s demands by asserting that 6000 or so Hmong are not, in fact, Laotian.

“Hmong? What Hmong? Oh those. Those are Hmong, sure, but they are not Hmong Hmong. They are your Hmong now. Good day.” Way to go Laos, you are awesomely creative!

Also awesomely creative is an individual, Mayor Frank Melton, of Jackson, Mississippi.

Mr. Melton was elected mayor in a campaign in which he promised to reduce violent crime in Jackson. When his assumption of office did not in itself achieve his stated goal, even after it was given plenty of time to work its magic, Melton decided to declare a state of emergency in the Mississippi capital, and under his emergency authority ordered a curfew for all minors and homeless people.

No, he didn’t claim that the homeless people were responsible for Jackson high levels of violent crime. He just tacked the curfew for the homeless people on to his order out of sheer liberal utopian idealism: he was moved by the plight of a homeless teenager to want to help. Which he did, by threatening homeless people with arrest if they didn’t let themselves be packed into a school gym every night.

How stupidly creative was Frank Melton’s curfew? Well, in the one month since it’s been in place, Jackson’s homicide rate has more than doubled! Fantastically stupid! I guess it’s easier to murder people now in Jackson than ever before, what with all the witnesses being put out of the way every night. And, better than that, Jackson has become a liberal utopian paradise, because Frank Melton has ended homelessness there, just like Franklin Roosevelt, our greatest liberal president, ended Japaneseness during WWII.

I thought nobody could top Frank Melton for stupid creativity until I heard about the new Las Vegas ban on feeding homeless people in parks. This new ban, devised by the Las Vegas city council, is outstanding. It is breathtaking in its stupidity and depravity. Only truly creative geniuses could be so stupid.

Boring cities elsewhere are always coming up with laws that are intended to ban feeding homeless people but that actually say boring things like, “you need a permit to feed more than such-and-so many people, so apply for a permit, and we’ll charge you so much for it you could have just used the money to buy dinners at fancy restaurants for everyone in the park.” Unlike those boring cities, Las Vegas has written an interesting and creative law, which addresses the problem head on. Their law says you just can’t feed homeless people in city parks. That’s it. You can feed housed people all you want. You just can’t feed homeless people.

How do you know if the person you’re feeding is homeless? They’ve thought of that problem and they’ve dealt with it in their brilliantly creative direct way. If they look homeless, that’s enough. The actual law defines a homeless person as an indigent "whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive assistance." So it doesn’t matter if they’re really homeless, you just need an ordinary person, like a cop, to think they might be.

The beauty of the law, to me, rests with the idea that to be ineligible to be fed in a park a person has to be believed, by an ordinary person, to be eligible to be fed. Congratulations Las Vegas! I could never have made that up!