Oh, my. What the Left has done to the English language! To words, beautiful words.
I love words. I have been publishing my thoughts for the past 51 years, ever since Rebbetzin Irene Klass invited me one summer weekend, when I was a bus boy at the now-defunct Pioneer Hotel and Country Club, to submit an article to the Brooklyn-based the Jewish Press. My readers know that I live not only for Torah and Judaism but also for puns. And not easy, cheap puns. I hate cheap puns. For me, it has to be special. If a pirate sells corn at the price of a buck an ear, I am happy.
But I despise how the Left has taken this beautiful language and made it into lies and deceit. If someone is living on handouts, be honest. He is taking a handout. Or, in its most genteel variation, “government assistance.” But don’t tell me it is an “entitlement” — because it is not. No one is “entitled.” I learned that from my Mother of blessed memory. I would sit and whine at age 7 or 8 at the dinner table over whatever bothered me, and she taught me: “Who do you think you are? You think you are specially entitled? You’re not entitled. No one owes you a living.” I learned that at age 6 or 7. No one owes me a thing.
They call their legislative bills by names that are lies. They decide to give certain demographic groups an advantage over others, and they call it “affirmative action.” What’s that all about? What is “affirmative” about telling my kid with a 1450 SAT score that she cannot get into a college because they are going to give her seat to an Illegal who can’t even take the test? Or they will give her seat to a person who is here very legally, but scored a hundred — or 500 — points lower. That’s not “affirmative.” That’s cheating.
The manipulation of words. Take “progressive.” I cannot think of anything more backward than the thinking, ideas, and policies of “progressives.” What is progressive about saying I can’t eat meat? Or I need to use paper bags instead of plastic? Before the “progressives” took over California, we used to have lots of electricity and water. Then came the “progressives.” They forced the local electric utilities to stop investing in infrastructure that made sense — like moving electric wires under the ground so as to prevent electric sparks on above-ground poles from igniting forest wildfires that will rage out of control — and instead to put that money into Solyndra-style solar energy. So now we have “progressive” energy. It is so progressive that they regularly cut off electricity in whole regions throughout the state amid the heat of summer or even winter because, without the expanded infrastructure into which the money should be spent, they cannot keep up with the expanded population, including illegals. After all, illegals need to eat, to drink, to breathe. They consume what everyone else consumes, only are here illegally. And the progressives have assured that the state cannot keep up with the infrastructural demands. But we do have a magnificent train to nowhere: $20 billion for 120 miles.
So they have “brown-outs.” Since you the reader don’t live here, lemme tell you what goes on here. You get phone calls from Edison — thoughtful robocalls — that say approximately: “If you live in Zone 108, please note that we will be cutting off your electricity for seven hours next Wednesday between the hours of 1:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. Have a nice day.” Then you get emails to that effect. The thoughtful robocall comes in daily, as does the email, because you need to plan. So you set up for the brown-out. Maybe you arrange to be in a car that time for a trip and air conditioning. If you need an oxygen concentrator, you make sure your batteries are charged. If you have someone to execute in an electric chair, you delay the execution until 8 p.m.
That word really rankles: “Progressive.” Grrrr. What is progressive about backing higher taxes, retrofitting every building in the country until we all go bankrupt, kneeling during the national anthem, and changing public school curricula to teach lies about American history and society while depriving children of time in the school day for them to learn real math and cursive writing?
All these abused words. News Flash: Someone here illegally is an illegal. Yes, he also is “undocumented.” But so is a guy who cannot find his marriage license or who is stopped by a traffic cop and cannot immediately produce his driver’s license, auto registration, and proof of insurance. The difference is that one is here legally and one not. But you may not say it.
Or the gender-distortion garbage. There are two genders: male and female. That is what it has been for more than 3,000 years. And it never ever will change. In Hebrew, the language of the Bible, there are two words: zakharand n’keivah — literally, “seed” and “aperture.” One kind of human dispenses seed. The other has an aperture into which the seed is deposited. Go to a Best Buy store and ask to buy a cable to connect a phone or a TV or an electric chair. The salesperson shows you what he or she has available: “Here is a cable that is male-to-male. This one is male-to-female. This one is female-to-female.” It is that simple: either it inserts or it is inserted into. This is not rocket science.
And yet we now are told that we may not say “his,” “her,” or “she,” “he” because they are presumptively transphobic pronouns. So, like water, gender is fluid. Humans born with centered bodily extension attachments immediately below their waist lines are not necessarily male. Others without those extensions but with centrally located apertures instead are not female. Suddenly words are used to corrupt reality, to make people crazy, to confuse children.
Did you ever see a horror movie, particularly as a kid, and get spooked by it so bad that, when you got home, you became convinced there is an evil person lurking under your bed or in your bedroom closet? The absolutely hands-down scariest thing I ever saw was that Twilight Zone episode with Martin Balsam as the caretaker of the wax museum, and then the museum closes, and he gets to take home with him the wax statues of the five most evil of murderers like Jack the Ripper. He places them in his basement, but he has to run the air conditioning 24/7 because the wax will melt otherwise. On the one hand, it is not California, so Newsom cannot murder them with a brown-out. On the other hand, the guy cannot afford the electric bill. So his brother-in-law Dave sneaks into the basement one night, and . . . OK, TMI.
But anyway, after watching that episode as a boy, I could not set foot in the basement of my parents’ home for a year. I was so freaked out, scared out of my mind — even though there were no wax statues in our Brooklyn basement, no air conditioning. My Mom asked me to help out the week before Passover and to bring up from the basement all the cartons of Passover plates, flatware, and stuff — and to bring down all the chometz, the stuff forbidden to be consumed over Passover — and I never refused to do any other chore for my Mom because Dad had died of leukemia at his age 45, my 14, and she needed me as a widow with four children. But there was no way I ever was going to go into that basement because Rod Serling had freaked me out with that episode. It made absolutely no sense, but it got into my head, and it permeated my psyche.
OK, so I dealt with my problem. I confronted my problem. I accepted the reality that Jack the Ripper does not live in my basement, not as a flesh-and-blood killer, not as a wax statue, and also, since he had run amok in 1888, he could not possibly still be alive a hundred years later. I made it my business to accept those realities, to stop fearing basements, to understand that basements are safe. And, for added good measure, I moved to California, where they have no basements — only garages, attics, and homeless tent encampments — because of earthquakes.
The point is: a really smart, really sophisticated kid like me could be spooked by a 60-minute TV episode in a show that my Mom had forbidden me ever to watch because too many of the episodes were scary, into thinking basements are out to get me. So what do you think it does to a contemporary 10- or 12- or 14-year-old when, instead of Rod Serling and Martin Balsam, some “progressive” LGBTQIA+ teacher gets into a boy’s head that he really is a girl, or into a girl’s head that she really is a boy? If you think back to the movie or TV show that irrationally got into your head as a kid, you begin to realize that a series of evil public school teachers can, over time, inject sexual dysphoria into your kids’ or grandchildren’ heads and leave them absolutely convinced that they are in the wrong body.
I have three daughters. Two grew up more classically female, fighting over whose dress or blouse each item was and liking pink. The other grew up more as a “tom boy.” She loved sports. She loved doing certain “guy things.” She liked blue. But she was a girl, through and through. When Rosh Hashanah season came, or Sh’mini Atzeret or Shavuot, she was as interested as were her sisters in getting a new dress for the chag, the holiday festival. She loved to cook. She also loved baseball and climbing trees. Thank G-d Almig-ty, we did not have to live in an era where some LGBTQIA+ teacher would have decided to psyche her into believing that she really was male in a female body, that she G-d forbid would need to take hormones that would mess up her health and have attachments implanted where they don’t belong, and have her breasts chopped off. Thank G-d Almig-ty.
Do you have a son? Same thing. Imagine you have a son, and he loves designing women’s clothes. I don’t know what goes on in the Lifshitz home, but Ralph Lifshitz did exactly that. When he realized that no one wants to put the label “Lifshitz” on their rear end or near their lips, he changed his surname and became “Ralph Lauren.” But he did not become Rhonda Lauren. Calvin Klein stuck with “Calvin” and his male appendage. So did Isaac Mizrachi. Even the homosexuals of Broadway: Nathan Lane did not cut it off and hire an Ultra Mohel to Bobbit him with a Bris Deluxe, down to all the trimmings. Nathan stayed Nathan. No need to leave the penile colony.
Can you imagine a seventh-grade public school teacher nowadays getting into your boy’s head that, because he likes designing clothes or painting or musicals, he really is a female trapped. So, without telling you, your boy secretly gets chopped, put on estrogen hormones, and has two silicone balloons implanted into his chest. Like my “Twilight Zone” encounter, kids are impressionable, and people with gender agendas can get into their heads for weeks, months — even years — without paying rent.
And then what? Eight, 10 years pass. Now the kid is 23. And the deformed child realizes, “Sonovogun, I really was born and meant to be a son of a gun, not a daughter of a gun. I want my Bobbit back. I want to trade in these two silicone things on my pectorals. I want to be a boy, a man. What have they done to me? What did I do to me? I miss Mr. Wiggly!” Or a girl at age 23: “How did I let them get into my head and convince me that I am a boy in a girl’s body? I want my breasts back. I don’t want this extra hanging thing in my underpants. What have I done to myself?”
It begins with words, with mendacities, falsehoods, lies. Or — as the progressives like to construct their lies: “It may not be your truth, but it is My Truth.”
The other day, Kamala Harris, who soon will be starting her job as Vice President, was at some school where some Jew-hater student got up and started lashing at Jews and at Israel. I remember the time when presidential candidate John McCain was at a town hall, and someone said something truly inappropriate about Obama, and McCain rightly called the questioner on it. You hate to call your friends and supporters on something, but heroism and courage requires it sometimes. In this way, although not in other important and critical ways, McCain showed courage. And Kamala Harris just stood there, listened to the Jew-hatred bile, and then encouraged the Jew-hater to continue spewing Her Truth: “Your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth cannot be suppressed, and it must be heard.”
That is our soon-to-be Vice President. A progressive who slept her way up the ladder of California Democrat politics, eventually reaping the Ultimate Entitlement: Since her parental lineage is that she descends from Jamaican slave-owners, and since she slept her way into Willie Brown’s world of Sacramento, she now is “entitled” to call herself African American even though she has no connections to Africa, and she even is “entitled” to lecture Brett Kavanaugh, a devout Catholic and most decent of family men, about sexual morality — because that is Her Truth.
It is painful experiencing this era of Public Mendacity that worships the bastardization of words, but we will out-live it. In time, as the societal pendulum swings back to “Normal” from “Perverse” and “Corrupt,” boys again will be boys, girls will be girls, handouts will be handouts, illegals will be illegals, and Truth will not be preceded by a progressive’s possessive.
