Skeptic
Once, when I was in college, I went to see a talk by The Amazing Randi.
The Amazing Randi, if you haven’t heard of him, was a popular stage magician turned professional skeptic of the paranormal.
He’d investigate the tricks of spoon benders and clairvoyants and then demonstrate how they were done.
*
I got to the campus auditorium 10 minutes before Randi was to speak.
Another event, part of the same conference, was concluding.
Hundreds of people packed the room.
On stage were a moderator and five panelists.
They’d just finished discussing one of the most eminent and influential scientists of the twentieth century.
Now it was time for the Q&A.
*
I stood in an aisle.
In the front rows of the auditorium I could make out leading intellectuals left and right.
In almost any other academic setting, they’d be superstars.
Here, compared to the deceased great under discussion, they were only fanboys.
Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist and proponent of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, for example, hopped up and down in his seat.
He waved his hand, begging to be called on.
But another guy got to the mic first.
*
The guy at the mic had wind-blown curly hair and a scraggly, crumb-filled beard.
His teeth were yellowed or missing.
He wore a weather-beaten backpack and a stained pants and sweater, both riddled with holes.
Anyone who’s ever attended a reading, lecture, or symposisum in a university town knows the type.
Someone whose only social outlet is taking over the public comment period with wild theories and stream-of-consciousness attacks on imagined enemies until forced to sit down.
And that’s exactly what happened when the scraggly stranger spoke.
*
“I have listened aghast for the last hour,” he began in a faint foreign accent.
“None of you understand the man you are talking about.”
“You lack all comprehension of his work.”
He alone could interpret the world-changing theories, the stranger said.
*
On stage the moderator and distinguished panelists crossed their arms.
In the front row, Gould stood and beckoned to be called next.
The rest of the audience, myself among them, shifted and sighed.
We waited for this crank to finish.
*
The scraggly stranger lectured.
He wove together history, biography, philosophy, and science into one grand search for truth.
This was the exact context necessary to comprehend the genius, he outlined.
These were the fundamental tenets necessary for future generations to build on his work.
No one listened.
We all just looked back and forth between him and the clock.
*
Two minutes passed.
Four.
Six.
Each time it seemed possible the staccato diatribe might conclude, the stranger cleared his throat, tightened his grip on the microphone, and continued speaking at an even louder volume.
Spittle from his mouth filled the air in front of him like fireworks.
The moderator and panelists squirmed, unwilling or unable to intervene.
Stephen Jay Gould slumped in his seat.
The rest of us rolled our eyes.
This crazy old man was filibustering, we realized.
He’d spout nonsense straight to the hour mark.
*
The final minute of the stranger talking was one of the most memorable of my life.
By now his fevered rantings, however incomprehensible, had the quality of a sacred invocation.
He mesmerized me with the sheer persistance of his impertinent mumblings.
He mesmerized all of us, I believe.
If pressed to service, the renowned minds in this room could invent an atom unsplitter or machinery to settle Mars.
For the past 9 minutes and the next 60 seconds, however, they were powerless to shut one man up.
*
The stranger concluded his explanation of life, the universe, and everything with 30 seconds left.
“Well…thank you, everyone,” the moderator may have gotten out before stranger interrupted him.
He still wasn’t done talking.
He’d known the famous scientist, he announced.
“We met in his apartment,” he said.
“We discussed this all the time.”
*
What?
Everyone in the room was whipsawed to attention.
This guy and the genius were…friends?
Why didn’t you say that at the beginning? the entire auditorium thought in unison.
Then we might have listened.
Then we might have learned.
*
The Amazing Randi waited in the wings.
The time remaining allowed the stranger just three more sentences.
“All of this I shared with him,” he said.
“‘Yes,’ he told me.”
“‘You are exactly right.’”