The Nature Of Evidence

In the Holy Bible we read of the ten plagues of Egypt. These were visited on Pharaoh because he would not let the Israelites leave Egypt and go to the Promised Land. There were plagues of locusts, frogs, flies and boils. All stirring stuff which eventually gained the desired outcome.

Because the sending of the plagues is a biblical story it is seen as belonging to biblical times alone. If it is taken seriously at all it is seen as somehow symbolic. Nowadays a plague would not be brought down on people who acted wrongly. Really? There are several recorded if little known examples of plagues being inflicted on wrongdoers until they finally did the right thing. By definition the wrongdoers had greater power than those they wronged which is why history is often silent on these examples of divinely inspired Justice.

In 1827 Phillippe Pissoir was employed as a bassoonist by the Orchestra of the Duchy of Heligoland. The Duke was not a great music lover but insisted on having a large orchestra to play for him at his frequent functions. Although this provided employment for Pissoir he became increasingly frustrated by his conditions of work. He was expected to practice the great classics for twelve hours a day to impress visitors and then spend six hours playing the dance music the Duke favoured. Eventually it proved too much for him. He asked to leave the employment of the Duke but he would not let him go. Pissoir therefore used his contacts in underground music circles to hire a large quantity of saxophones. These had been banished from every orchestra on the grounds that they were an upstart instrument. Soon every music shop in Heligoland displayed saxophones prominently in its window and members of the orchestra hid them under their seats and played them without warning instead of the instruments they were supposed to be playing. Outrage consumed the court. The Duke remained firm in his stance and began finding saxophones on his pillow and in every room. Several musicians were hung for leaping out from behind curtains playing saxophone music. Eventually the Duke let Pissoir go and most of the rest of the orchestra with him. He soon recruited new players from small states being absorbed into larger ones. Pissoir ended up in the national orchestra of free Belgium where he rose to become a copyist. It is his action which is commemorated in the famous statue in Brussels of a boy urinating which so many people pass by unthinkingly.

In 1971 Donald Burp was employed by an advertising agency in Montreal. He did his job well but became increasingly concerned about the medium itself. Provoking irrational fear and desire became a problem for him. Eventually he decided he wanted to work in engineering and asked to be released from his contract with the agency. The agency refused to accept his resignation and contacted the company he was due to work for threatening them with legal action if they employed him. For good measure they did the same with all the other engineering companies and advertising agencies. Donald was desperate to leave but had no funds to stop his employer doing these things. Finally he struck back by introducing a new logo. He took a piece of yellow paper and a few strokes of a pen and invented the Smiley. Almost as soon as he first included this in a typed letter the plague of smileys spread like wildfire across the world. Soon everyone had seen a smiley without knowing where they came from or why. In time people began to think they were being watched. These little smiling faces which had infiltrated everywhere for no apparent reason must be up to no good. The agency began to think so too. Whatever they set Donald to work on the flow of smileys continued unabated and no one took any notice of an ad campaign without smileys. It was either let him do things his way and thereby see him leave or go out of business due to smiley strangulation. Finally Donald was allowed to leave. He went off into engineering and created a stir by inventing the speed bump. These soon became almost as ubiquitous as smileys and caused concern that he might be inflicting another plague on the world to escape engineering. Fortunately for him it was discovered that speed bumps breed on their own. Donald retired in 1995 to look after his autistic camel and the plague of smileys has been tamed by its inclusion as an official symbol on office computer programmes and subsequent relegation to the status of an ordinary letter.

There is one other plague which has never been recorded because we are still in the middle of it. Its progenitor was American genius William Sidis. This man worked at menial jobs by choice after a brilliant early career as a mathemetician and cosmologist. He was never well treated by the world around him which expected him to adapt to it rather than the other way round. He had every right to expect that he would be let off the merry-go-round of mediocrity and allowed to do things his way. But the world wanted him to be a permanent travelling exhibit and refused to let him go. Under the terms of his will Sidis decreed that in return for the abuse he had received his executors were to implement a formula he had discovered for unleashing a new plague on the world. The clause was dismissed as the ramblings of a madman. But who can deny that his executors did their job? True to the word of Sidis political and civil life around the globe has been inflicted with a plague of idiots. Now we all want to be let go. The trouble is there are already so many people in the world we cannot become a plague of ourselves.