The Tower Babel, USA - or Is It Babble?!

Last nights' FoxNews O'Reilly Factor featured one of the strangest conversations I've ever watched, a walk in the dizzy - but not dizzying - heights of asinine racist and feminist casuistry like none ever before. Weirdly - O'Reilly's term, matter of fact - convoluted and puzzling, it bordered on fustian comedy. I kept expecting someone to suddenly giggle and exclaim "Fooled you!"

No such luck - they were serious. Whew!


This, actually, is a postscript to yesterday's essay, reminded by my having watched TV last night and the bizarre discussion of Senator Joe Biden's "clean" remark having to do with Senator Barak Obama. Following hard on that one was a discussion last night between to FoxNews Bill O'Reilly (the guy may be too far right for my tastes, but he makes a lot of sense, sometimes) and two women whose names escaped me. One, though, was the black woman I mentioned earlier, whose basic tactic polemically is to prevent her adversary from speaking by interrupting and continuing to talk over him until he forgets what he meant to say.

The back of a hand seems to be the response most appropriate.

At any rate, discussion had to do with whether calling someone - it may be that only black people are included - "articulate" is "condescending." It seems - I didn't happen to have heard it - Biden's remarks also included what now seems destined to become (god help discourse and our poor language) the "A-Word."

Apparently - and parenthetically - one of the women, she of the "interrupt and keep talking" tactic - really has only a vague notion about the definition of "condescending." Nevertheless, she said, she knows when a word is condescending. O-O-O-O-kay!

Anyway, O'Reilly was right on target when he said he suspected that most "Americans" must be scratching their heads and wondering what the hell this is all about. The first five people I asked about it said, "Damned if I know." One averred, though, that "those people" are looking for any excuse at all to bitch. It looks more and more like white people are to be forbidden to discuss black, period."

I wouldn't go that far, but this - as I said the other day here - approaches the "niggardly" thing a few years ago. As closely as I could follow the argument, the women were saying that any time a white - maybe I should say "non-black" (here a disclaimer: in this climate, unable to be certain how anything one says will be taken or used, it is important to "this is English, and I mean the Webster's Dictionary definition of what I'm saying - not whatever the listener decides is the meaning) - person uses the word "articulate" to refer to a black person, it is "condescending."

Well, now. What am I to say? Well, to begin with what one says generally elicits in the mind of the listener a certain mental process. That is perhaps not the case where these two women are concerned, but I did say "generally." The process goes as follows, and results accordingly: first, we are apparently to accept the idea that all black people are presumed to have - shall we say? - learning disabilities where the speaking of language is concerned. Either that, or we are presumed to think that a black person - Senator Obama, in this instance - is exceptional for his being "articulate."

If it is the sound of the word that is offensive, perhaps I should repair to the oblique reference. The "A-word," I mean.

I'm tippy-toeing around here because I really have no idea what the hell that's about, just as I sometimes have no idea what the hell any woman has gotten all stiff-necked and indignant about. They've always lived in a world of words, words, words, you know - the result being that they have all kinds of special meanings for plain words and language, things having to do with context, mere sound, tone, or tenor, and fifty things a guy never so much as notices.

"How do you like my hair?"

"Fine."

"You don't like it!" (she's sniffling already).

"Huh?"

"FINE? - that's it?"

"Oh for Christ's sake, it's awesome . . ."

"You don't mean that!"

Two days later, when she speaks to him again, he still doesn't know what the hell happened, and gave up wondering yesterday.

"Articulate?" - that's all you can say?"

"Huh?"

Never mind - you get the point. Think of all those weird connotations words somehow acquire when used by a woman. "Abortion," for instance - meaning to kill a baby. Oma - grandmother - used to say "limb," meaning leg. People having sex were "doing it." Sweating was "glowing." Reference to the private parts - cock or cunt - was "down there." Et cetera.

Moving into the era of women's liberation, it got even spookier. To call a woman "girl" was offensive - like calling a black senator arti - oops! - the A-Word. Women weren't addressed any more as "miss" or "misses," it was "ms." I never did figure out which, or how to say that last one. Most people sounded like a constipated bee. Apparently so confused about the difference between sex and gender, the girls - dammit, I mean women - demanded that we say "him or her," "he and she," and worse. People became "chairpersons" instead of chairmen, and a dozen more examples of what was yet to come.

As the language soared into the dizzying heights - carried there by the dizzy - the linguistically crippling effect of all the euphemizing and oblique references became more and more apparent. More and more, too, I began walking away from people in the middle of their malapropping attempt at conversation. From "parameters" - the user had no idea what the hell that means, but he meant perimeter, constraints, limits, or the like - to handicapped people who were "challenged," to the latest nitwit nattering, "metrosexual"- meaning limp-wristed wimp - confusion proliferated.

A presidential study, that of women in combat, ran two hundred, fifty-two pages without once using the word "kill." Military units, ships, tanks, and planes, "engaged" one another. A RAND corporation type - a female, naturally - recommended "establishing" a "kinder, gentler military - more on the order of Alcoholics Anonymous or the Salvation Army" (the comparison or juxtaposition was hers, mind you). People handicapped in one way or another were "challenged." We went from "colored," to "Afro-American," to "black" - then back again. The "this-or-that word" start. WE had the "N-Word,' the "J-Word," the "P-Word," and the "D-Word."

When a city councilman in California committed the faux pas "call a spade a spade" somehow became, we almost had the "S-Word." A little while before - or after; I don't pay much attention to nonsense, usually - another poor soul, another councilman, made the mistake of using the word "niggardly" in discussing something in the city budget.

The word, incidentally, means stingy or miserly - has nothing to do with race, creed, culture, national origin, or gender. The guy lost his job, nevertheless.

Things got even spookier when a murderer went free because the one of the police detectives investigating the case and testifying in court used the "N-Word." Lest anyone mistake how serious it was all becoming, a murderer went free because one of the police detectives investigating the case and testifying in court used the "N-Word."

Most recently, we have what I've with a modicum of sarcasm begun calling the "I-Word" - the execrable "issues." People have "hair issues," car issues, travel issues, physical and spiritual issues.

The other day a woman had "issues in bed." Yech!

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera - ad infinitum. Ad nauseam. We talked in pantyhose code, all of it trimmed in yards and yards of chintz.

Now this. Calling a man - a U.S. Senator - articulate somehow insults his entire race and/or culture (by the way - isn't he an "American?"). So chastised was O'Reilly that he closed the interview by calling the two bubble-heads (mentally "challenged?") women "nice."

How that slipped by the censors, I'm not sure. If "clean" implies that everybody of this race (religion, gender - political party?) other than the senator are "dirty" - we seem to be talking about hygiene here, rather than honest, trustworthy, and uncorrupted politically - and "articulate" means that all his racial, religious, gender, and political peers suffer from the Dubbya Disease (foot in mouth, tongue and pivot tooth tangle, and dyslalia or dysphasia generally), then "nice" says everyone black and/or female is not nice.

I think we need an interpreter - a woman, of course.

What I know for sure that we need is a moratorium - a moratorium on this nonsense. For my friends in the black - or whatever (did I just infer that everyone of that race is white) community, it needs to be said that you are beginning to look ridiculous, reinforcing all the most odious stereotypes once thrown at you by the worst of your enemies.

For all the pantyhose and panty-waist petty intellectuals who somehow derive political power (how's that for alliteration?) from abuse of the language, knock it off. It's becoming dangerous. Keeping a firm connection between language in reality is important, language having become a kind of reality in itself to "Americans." Our kids are already so damned confused by the straight-jacket of virtual reality capitalist Madison Avenue advertising, movie-making, television, and CIA Operation Mockingbird have them strapped into, that they're becoming suicidal and homicidal.

And for all the pussy-whipped, "metrosexual" males and the feminist masters you somehow let do that by means of language-confusion alone, you're beginning to look pretty "challenged" mentally, too. I wouldn't give a rat's ass, either, but it's killing people, and lots of them. You've not only put a simpering wimp wannabe warrior like George W. Bush in office, you've effectively created with your feckless, paralysis-by-analysis, Tower of Babel - and Babble - dithering a dictatorship for him. While you convene only to go on yapping endlessly and without meaningful result save demagoguery, he goes right on "engaging" - that's killing, mind you - his apparently imagined enemies. A megalomaniacal misfit, but for even more of this nonsensical, who-can-tell-what-anybody-means-anymore, speech and "politically correct" claptrap the dictator might never have reached office in the first place.

Geez, Hal - that was pretty articulate. I just hope I know what I just said. Maybe I need to hand this to Rita for a translation.