A DAY TO CELEBRATE OUR FOOLS IS REALLY WHAT AMERICA NEEDS

Today is April Fool's Day. No kidding.

As holidays go, this is not much. It's like Columbus Day ... only without bank closures or historical controversy.

No one speculates on the motivations of those whose actions inspire a day to commemorate fools.

Most calendars don't denote April 1 as April Fool's Day, so you wonder how the holiday endures. The EverReady desk calendar I keep at work doesn't list this commemoration. Nor does the Monet Masterworks calendar I got as a Christmas gift.

The Baldwin Cooke Company of Deerfield, Ill., which produces the calendar I carry with me, also pays no attention to April Fool's Day. Folks in Deerfield are not uniformly humorless ... probably just a little busy trying to live down the community's country-cooked name.

Despite this lack of recognition from calendar savants, the holiday persists, not exactly unlike a stubborn cold.

As best guesses have it, April Fool's Day came to prominence as a holiday in 18th-century England, probably about the time royal authorities there were writing off colonists as benign ruffians.

In Scotland, fools were sent on this day to "hunt the gowk," the cuckoo. In France, the target of abuse is called the poisson d'avril.

In Mexico, the day is celebrated on Dec. 28, which must really fool residents braced for April Fool's jokes.

Lovers usually like the rewards of Valentine's Day. Persons with thanks to give get a lot out of Thanksgiving.

On the other hand, fools loathe April Fool's Day, a dubious tribute to their unfortunate uniqueness. I've never been partial to the holiday myself, nor do I delight in what these two sentences imply.

I taught high school for a couple of years and acquired a distaste for April Fool's Day. Remarks that ring clever in a teen-age student's mind might, in the general domain of public consumption, be light in weight and, indeed, annoying.

How many times in the course of an academic day should you have to deal with the "your-fly's-open/your-shoe's-untied" mentality? If you have six class periods and an average of about 20 students in a class, you can nearly ascertain the number of times you have to.

Availed of the nature of this day and its capacity for unpleasantness, all good fools should hope it would fail one year to enter anyone's thoughts and, thus, foster a trend of annual omission.

Else, the holiday could be elevated to an even greater awareness and "repositioned," as the image consultants say.

April Fool's Day could be given a snazzier name Fool's Holiday, maybe and celebrated in much grander fashion. It could serve to highlight the achievements of dullards throughout our history.

There could be parades honoring those who said man would never fly, baseball players would never earn $1 million a year and Johnny Carson would never make it as a talk show host. Maybe homage could be paid to the inventor of knock-knock jokes. Maybe you could get a vice president to be grand marshal.

This day is important to America. Unless we celebrate our fools, how else can we lift them to their proper place in our society ... especially now that the House bank is closed.