I’ve been wondering lately whether I, too, haven’t been guilty
of “incivility” and “heated political rhetoric.” My rhetoric has
been called lots of things of late — confused, frivolous, inane —
but never heated. Certainly, there was a time when I traded barbs
with the best, but I suppose I’ve mellowed with age, and, like my
libido, my political passions have undergone a cooling off period.
Where once I would scrawl letters to the editor with a pen dipped
in blood and bile, today I tend to read the headlines and shrug and
shuffle off to the kitchen for another piece of pie. About the only
thing that gets me heated these days is my Bubblespa footbath. (I
recommend the model with toe touch control.)
That and being told by politicians, professors and
anchorwomen how to behave.
I already have a mother. I don’t need Katie Couric and
Nancy Pelosi telling me to sit up straight, quit fidgeting, and “if
I don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything.” Ever since
the Tucson tragedy, we’ve been hearing that our words —
particularly our verbs — are encouraging crazy people to do crazy
things (as if they needed any). Apparently, just the simple use of
a descriptive verb, like, say, “wrestle,” could trigger… err, I
mean cause… some vice president of sales to body slam an
accountant.
Actually, they may have something there. Just this
morning, I heard someone on NPR say, “We need to really tackle
these issues.” I was immediately overwhelmed with the desire to
sprint down the aisle and clothesline the director of marketing.
Unfortunately, she stiff-armed me and rolled on to paydirt, by
which I mean the ladies room.
Liberals have tried for decades to bring about social
change by telling people (and when I say people I mean men) how to
behave. But men are stubborn animals. We may pretend to be more
sensitive (as we did in the '70s), if it means we might get lucky
more often, or more compassionate (as we did in the '90s), if it
means more votes, but we all know that a leopard cannot change its
spots.
So liberals decided if they can’t change behavior, they
can at least change the vocabulary. And it’s easy, since they
already control the media, the government, the colleges, and most
of the other places people tend use a lot of words.
IF THIS ALL sounds vaguely familiar it is probably because
two decades ago feminists and their male enablers launched a
similar Scorched Earth Strategy against the English language. Back
then they succeeded in eliminating from newspapers, television, and
books whole categories of words that were deemed sexist, or could
possibly be construed to potentially be sexist. Perfectly fine
words like fireman were banned, replaced by the neutered
“firefighter.” Liberal editors would rush to the barricades
defending Larry Flynt’s right to peddle smut, but
manufacture? OMG! That was sexist and had to
go.
Since Tucson, editors have been having a “conversation”
about banning more words from their newspapers, which pretty soon
are going to read like The Poky Little Puppy, containing
all 26 politically correct words and no more.
The madness seems destined to trickle down to even the
sports pages. The editor of my local newspaper had this to
say:
Should such [pugilistic] terms be used in sports stories? How
about those outside the sports section? Are they appropriate in
stories about business or politics? It isn’t uncommon to see
stories about companies “targeting consumers,” or politicians
“battling it out.”
What I wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall of the sports
editor’s cubicle after reading that memo:
“Sorry, fellas, no more writing ‘the Blues and the North Stars
“battled” to a 2-2 tie.’ You can say, they ‘played’ to a 2-2 tie,
or…hell, I don’t know, just say they tied. Who the hell cares
anyway?”
First sportswriters were forced to give the same level of
coverage and fake enthusiasm to women’s sports as men’s sports —
even though nobody gives a damn about women’s sports — and now
they have to adopt the language of a tea party. And not
The Tea Party either, but a real, doily and lace tea
party.
When I was a kid, we were smart enough to know that
“sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt
me.” Today, words are thought to wreak all kinds of terrible
psychic damage, from lowering one’s self-esteem to driving one
homicidally insane.
I don’t know. Maybe we were just tougher back
then.
