Oh, My God - Not the N-Word Again!

Oh, my god! Some moron has done it again. The N-word. Right in public; hell, right in front of an audience. The son of a bitch (anybody remember when that one could get you a punch in the mouth?) said it two or three times! Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god!

Now we’ll have days, weeks even, of national garment-tearing, grief, and mea culpa-ing. Ministers who preach the gospel of forgiveness will demand everything from national expiation and prostration to reparation (we make, i.e., every soul with so much as a single DNA bead that is negroid financially wealthy). Politicians, those paragons of public piety (and private prurience), will posture for all their worth, protesting (I’m curious to see how many pee’s, or how much pee, I can get in a sentence) their prodigious love of everything Afro.

And one of the most racist societies in history will nod national approval.

My turn. I think - no, I demand – that Keith Richards (or whatever the hell his name is – who cares about people like this and what they say, anyway?) be dragged from wherever he is found, taken to the nearest tree tall enough, and hanged. Then, I demand that his body be dragged through the streets until suitably mutilated, hung up again, and left for carrion. And, of course, as a lesson to whomever might again utter that hated product of voice-box glottal stops and fricatives, we should hand a sign on him saying, “He used the N-word.”

Further, I demand that all of the Richards family be eradicated, their places of residence razed to the ground, the ground plowed and sewed with salt so as never again to support life. The name “Richards” should be stricken from the public record.

There.

No, wait a minute – it could happen again. I demand finally that the penalty for public, or - now that everything anyone can do is subject to federal and governmental scrutiny and exposure – private utterance of that apparently all-powerful word the penalty be death. Not by humane lethal injection, hanging, guillotine, or firing squad, mind you, but – now that the Bush-ian War on Terror has breached that societal barrier – torture to death.

There!

Ooops! Not yet. I demand, also, that each time someone as nationally powerful as Keith Richards (who the hell, by the way, is Keith Richards – or do I have the name wrong?) says “nigger” there be declared seven days of national mourning. Flags at half mast – anybody for dragged in the dirt? – moments of silence at football games, and all that. All television and news broadcasters shall, under penalty of law, produce fifteen minutes every hour of soul-searching and as pious as possible programming concerning the odious history of slavery – black, that is.

No mention shall be made of other nations, cultures, or races enslaved during human history. Under penalty of law, again, of course. Any distraction from our goal is traitorous. Your for us or against us, and any consideration or concern for any other objective or subject is treason.

That should do it. Wait a minute – what about the people who gave what’s-his-name a forum? Close the place. Confiscate their property and funds. Whatever else anyone can think of in the way of penalty shall be legalized. Tar and feathers included. Have I missed anything?

What about the people who by their having remained in the place gave tacit approval to what Creep – Keith, was it – said? Well, I leave that to the sanctimonious, Reverend Al, Reverend Jesse, Reverend (depending on the “issue,” of course) Hillary, or whomever.

Now I’m satisfied. Until the next time. Oh, there’ll be a next time. If the politically pious should ever succeed in eradicating that word so wondrous both in its political effect and the manner in which it can be exploited, there will be someone who will resurrect it for – you guessed it’s obvious – reasons.

Obvious. My god, people – how gullible can you get? How vulnerable and helpless? A single word. Like I said, glottal stops and fricatives, the product of muscle and bone expending less than half a calorie. GROW UP! Living around you is like living sane in a hospital for the criminal insane. I can’t sleep anymore without a damned pistol under my hip. Using the gift of speech publicly these days – hell, even going our in public – is fraught with “issues” having to do with “issues.” One word somehow related to an issue can become an “issue” – you could even get in trouble.

Everybody check their dictionary – “issue.”

That – the N-word, remember? - while another nitwit faction like the lynch mob frothing at the mouth over the latest Freudian “N-word” slip, demands that my gun be taken and I be left to the mercy of people like them.
With an entire religion and related culture foaming at the mouth with their rabid lust to kill us, and our borders left wide open by our “serve and protect” “leaders,” we spend days and billions on a careless lapsus lenguae (slip of the tongue)? A single word?

With hundreds of our soldiers being killed in a war certainly and incontrovertibly the most stupidly irrational and ill-advised in human history – to say nothing or prepared for – we stop to agonize and fulminate over a spoken word? My god (yeah, I know, I repeat myself – I can’t help it).

I could go on, but you must by now be aware of literally scores of problems – no, god damn it, they are not issues – that threaten millions of lives, even our national existence. We either grow up, mature, or we perish. Years – no, decades – ago, my youngest came home one day in tears because he had been called an insult.
I now counsel my country (at my age, time was, an elder could do that) as I once counseled my son. He was seven - considerably more mature than you, but I’m not that good at infantile psychology. An insult, I said, does nothing to the person offered it. And I use the term, “offered,” advisedly. Sometimes, language itself can be instructive. Insult is offered – only.

It does not have to be accepted, meaning it does not have to have effect. Only, moreover, when it is accepted does it have effect. And one of the “effects” is to demonstrate the immaturity and – yes, the stupidity – of him who accepts it. Whether accepted or not, an insult of the spoken variety demeans the one who offers it. Like the opponent who committed a foul during one of the wrestling or judo contests I participated in during most of my adolescent and adult life, the person who offers verbal insult shouts to the wide world his own inadequacy. By the rules, he can’t cut it.

However he desires or hates, he is incapable of anything more.

I now desire that the reader know how long I deliberated concerning whether to write what follows. The society and nation are redolent with the stench not only of racism, but the posturing and scrofulous piety of those who would exploit it. I don’t wish to join their nauseating and odious ranks.

But I think what I say here might have more weight – or the reader might better take its measure, good or ill – were I to point out that I was an orphan who largely reared himself. That meant little or no influence or indoctrination from peers or elders. There was none of Hillary’s “village.” The result, once considered by me to justify some resentment and lament, proved to be salubrious in at least one manner. I grew up without prejudice and bias concerning race, religion, culture, or the like. Living in a sod hut by a river while attending high school, I came to dislike most about my fellow human beings their intuitive rationality and peculiar ideation.

That was, mostly, their nitwit religions, biases, prejudices, and bigotries.
To an adolescent male living in a world of sometimes – often, it seemed – brutal and cruel cause and effect, there was no room, none at all, for idea or opinion based on myth or emotion. No religion, bias, prejudice, or bigotry. I didn’t give a shit what anything or anybody looked like, or thought like, I was only interested in what he, she, or it did or could do. Everything else took up time and thought I couldn’t afford to waste on triviality. Things, everything significant or important, were right or wrong, and readily apparent. One who is surviving against the elements and the wilderness during, for instance, a winter in Iowa does not tolerate error.
Neither does he have time for the trappings of ease and comfort of more conventional society. One worried, fearful concerning whether he will eat or not, or whether he will freeze to death in his sleep, pays no attention to being offered verbal insult.

A few months before I became an orphan, I recovered from poliomyelitis. The weakened and emaciated condition the disease left me in made me the target of every bully I happened to accost. I got strong and learned to fight, obviously, but I also learned that I much preferred being assaulted with speech to being assaulted with punches, kicks, and thrown objects. Spoken insult was ignored or forgotten in seconds. Cuts and bruises had to be endured.

I also learned that to create trouble in the mind – prejudge – was debilitating, like exerting all the effort necessary for carrying a load that wasn’t there. “Borrowing trouble,” I used to call it. It slowed me down in a fight, stole my thought processes and reasoning powers – I knew that without them, I would soon know pain or deprivation – and besmirched my self-esteem. I knew weaklings and women “borrowed trouble” like that.

I also learned love in a manner different from my fellow. Without nonsense, I mean. I learned that love is a one-way - not two way - street. People and things react to what you do to or for them. Good, bad, favor, insult, they do not react otherwise. Period. When you love, you do for the thing or person you love; and you do it regardless of what the thing loved might do or not do to or for you.
Love simply desires, demands, and will do whatever contributes the greatest possible good for its object. Period (again).

But there’s more. The physical universe, reality is never one-sided, never two sided, or three sided. It isn’t even dimensional. You can’t do anything all by itself, with just one result. Not possible. (sorry). Love that pretends – just in the pretense – is contradictory, oxymoronic, self-defeating. It is, at least in some degree, hate.

Hate, and all its corollaries, is the human condition. Hate is so all-pervasive that it can even be unconscious, unintended. Result? The only way to keep the ledger out of the red is relentless practice of love (people who know me won’t believe I said this – until they think about it for a minute).

If I sound smug or self satisfied now, consider what the differences between us might be. Go back and read what I said about my formative years and compare them with your own. Mine led to my never having left any place I was without my having assured that it was better for my having been there. Sometimes, that could be something as small as picking up discarded trash and disposing of it properly. A few times, it was something as significant as requiring risk of maiming or life. But the place was better for my having been there.
Period.

Friends of mine – those I mentioned a minute ago – would tell you that I seldom – most would say they’ve never heard it – say “I love you.” To anybody. I’ve learned that the word love is a verb, not a noun - done, not said. I know that human beings have a sometimes ruling tendency to believe that said is done. “I love you” is exactly like “I hate you.” It doesn’t mean a thing until you do something. Oh, you may, indeed – that’s what indeed means, you know – actually do what you say.

How often, really, does your experience tell you that happens?

I love my country. I love her because she is the cultural embodiment of what I believe to be the most important words ever spoken and lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights . . .” I love her because I have seen her struggle valiantly and relentlessly – and agonizingly - to do – to live - those words.
And I am fucking tired of people who seem determined to live in a language-only reality, where a fast neutron word like “nigger” can be fired into the atomic core mass of society made unstable and volatile by its own selfish pretensions, and create a national nuclear explosion threatening to destroy what I love so much - my country.

I'm also pretty tired of a society that makes the utterance of some loon somehow become famous - or infamous - significant just because he's something called a "celebrity." My god (oops, said that maybe once too often)!

God damn it – grow up! Remember who the hell you are! You may think you are so high and mighty that nothing you do, no error you can make, will bring you down to destruction. You are wrong. You are, in fact, a tottering weakling, debilitated more every day by things like those I speak of here. Take it from a kid who once – still does, actually – faced survival’s implacable demands in an unmistakable arena that you are just like me. You can be had by your enemies – and they include you; it’s how reality works, remember? – and it will happen soon, now. You are not only a demented hypochondriac, sucking up every nitwit nostrum and narcotic you can find, you are suicidal, tearing at yourself like a wounded, pain-crazed animal.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.”

Love is a one-way street.