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Roomie is beginning to think that I'm blossoming into an Oomph! fan. Not so. Aside from a handful of tracks--"Gekreuzigt", "Sex", "Augen Auf", "Krueppel", "Gott ist ein Popstar", and "Eine Frau Spricht im Schlaf", I find them pedestrian.
I am, however, besotted with Dero Goi. Sure, he loves to hear himself talk, and he clearly never met a mirror he didn't seduce, fuck, and leave a logy, sated mess amongst the bedclothes, but he has such a sense of whimsy mixed with his reserved sense of humor. Last night, I found a video of him poking fun at the self-important literary establishment by conducting a "serious literary critique" of a "great novel for our times, which turned out to be a German children's book involving a penguin. When he started comparing the events of the book to themes in Faust, I laughed until I nearly choked to death. It's all rather dry and probably of little interest to anyone without a minimal knowledge of German and years of suffering silently through those interminable college lit courses wherein some failed auteur waxed philosophical about weighty tomes like Hardy's Jude the Obscure or the collected works of James Joyce and tried unsuccessfully to draw labored comparisons between those narratives and current events, so I won't repost it, but I'd laughed any harder, I'd've prolapsed my asshole and regurgitated my innards like a startled sea cucumber.
Dear social justice language popo:
"Retard" is a painful word. So is "spazz". But I don't care how loudly you shout or how tightly you clench your ass cheeks for great justice, you will never convince me that "twit" is an ablist term. I don't care how determinedly you torture its etymology. The fact is that most words people use to describe a person of dubious intelligence can likely be traced back to use against mentally-disabled people. "Imbecile". "Idiot." "Simpleton." "Fool." "Dullard". "Peon." "Dunderhead". "Dolt." All of these are terms used against the stupid and feckless and those who put their brains on autopilot and wander through their daily lives with their thumbs up their asses. They are contemptuous terms, and society reserves a healthy dose of contempt for its broken. Hence, it uses these terms and many more--most of them far less couth than the aforementioned against them. It is perhaps unfortunate and definitely unkind.
But--and follow me here--disabled people haven't cornered the market on stupidity. No, that is an equally-opportunity affliction, one from which an alarming number of perfectly able folks suffer. There are scores of beautiful people who are dumber than a box of hammers. Contrary to the rantings of the ultra-sensitive sects of the social justice movement, stupidity exists. And because it exists, society has a right to describe it as best it might. With words like "moron". "Idiot." "Dolt". "Imbecile." "Fool". "Empty-headed lackwit." "Twit." That is what words do. They make concrete the abstract, the picture we all see in our heads when we stir our thought soup and watch the pictures float to the surface. Words describe the taste on our tongue just before it twitches to life and unspools the pictograph inside our brains. Words are the Post-It notes of human ideas. Most humans recognize stupidity when they see it, and so they have created a word set for it, and so long as they apply it to all the incidents thereof that they recognize, they should not be considered ablist terms of OMG oppression.
Idiots exist. Morons exist. Dolts exist. Twits exist. So do imbeciles and dullards. I'm not going to pretend they don't by erasing legitimate language from the lexicon. The words have committed no sin, and anyway, erasing them does no good. Even the dullards can be inventive, and if the language police succeed in quashing these words, then the collective will of the stupid and banally-cruel will exert itself in the creation of new terms with which to unwittingly describe themselves as they gleefully hurl them at others. Want proof? Let's look at the evolution of language as it pertains to disability:
-Cripple(d): This was a perfectly acceptable word to describe the physically disabled not long ago. It was in the Bible, and when I was a patient there, Shriners' Hospital for Crippled Children did ground-breaking surgeries. But someone decided it was insensitive.
-Handicapped: This was also a perfectly serviceable word to describe disabled folks. My mother called me this. So did my teachers. I rode the handicapped bus. I wasn't traumatized. It was just the word for what made me different than the other children. It was the word that denoted things meant just for folks like me. When I was little, it was comforting, code for "my stuff". When I got older, it lost some of its luster because it sounded so ugly on teenaged tongues. Someone decided it was insensitive.
-Disabled: Still a serviceable word, and the de facto code for services and resources set aside for disabled folks. There are disabled seats on buses and trains, and when I see Rammstein again, I will sit in the "disabled seating area." The disabled seating area, by the by, is a patch of concrete, a parking space for a human body. Most people in meatspace still use this word, but it's slowly falling out of favor in the lalala-world of cyberspace.
-Physically-challenged: An aging darling of the Internet social justice crowd. It's also a stupid, onerous word because it implies a challenge that can be overcome if you just tug on those damn bootstraps hard enough.
-Special needs: A wishy-washy term for disability, doubtlessly invented by some dewy-eyed fool who shied away from the atavistic revulsion they felt when they looked at a child whose spine was exposed by Spina Bifida and ashamed of the guilty relief they felt when they looked at their healthy children. This is also an onerous term because it gave bigoted asswipes an outlet for their smug superiority. "Oh, fuck them," they sneer as they pass a person in a wheelchair floundering towards the airplane terminal. "They think they're so goddamned special, they can do it themselves. Entitled asshole!" They tell themselves that disabled people aren't asking but the bare minimum necessary to achieve even the slightest social equity, but demanding "special" deference and dispensations so that we can lie about while they pay for our chalets and BMW wheelchairs and government-subsidized plasma TVs. Thanks a heap, word police.
-Differently-abled: Now we've ascended to the realms of the delusional. This implies that disabled people as a collective possess abilities denied to the able. People who use this term are usually parents in denial or Internet crusaders who have no inkling of what life with a disability truly entails. These folks seem to think that disable people are X-men in waiting who just haven't revealed our badassery yet. Where are my laser-eyes, dammit? I've got some assholes to immolate.
-PWD: The acronym favored by lazy crusaders. Supposedly, it recognizes my humanity by calling me a person before recognizing my disability.
No. Stop. If you need an acronym to remind yourself of my humanity, then your problems cannot be solved by simply changing your vocabulary. I am not special needs. I am not a closet X-man. And I am not a goddamned mnemonic device for people who have trouble finding their empathy in the mornings. I am crippled. I am handicapped. I am disabled. I am a human being who is physically different, and who therefore needs different accommodations in order to live my life. It is not cruelty or self-loathing to acknowledge this. It is the truth. Stark and simple. I am crippled, I am handicapped. I need help doing things. This makes me different, but it does not make me lesser. It should not.
And yet, by attempting to efface these words from the language, the language police are saying exactly that. They are saying that people on the receiving end of these descriptors are lesser, that these words denote that which is worthless and ugly and brutish and pitiful. They are telling me that be be crippled is to be a thing undesirable to anyone, something to be erased, forbidden, unacknowledged. Crippled people are embarrassing, but differently-abled people, those mythical creatures with special abilities as yet unattained by the rest of mankind, well, they're...inspirational.
No, thanks. I'm going to go right on using words like crippled and handicapped, and I'm going to keep on using twit and lunatic and idiot, too. Because changing terms changes nothing until you change the attitude behind them, and we haven't even found that road yet. Want proof of that, too?
Once "retard" was supposedly vanquished from polite fannish circles, it was duly replaced by the word "speh." The bigots simply found another bit of invective to hurl, and this one came with a drooling smiley. From a "retard", which is at least a word, to a single grunted syllable of unmistakable scorn. What progress. Keep up the good work, you tireless keyboard warriors for linguistic utopia. I'm sure your tireless work on my behalf will keep me warm while I'm standing in front of the utterly inaccessible concert hall and wondering how I'm going to get inside.
Congratulations, Rammgents! According to Ticketmaster, the Rosemont Horizon is sold out. Let's hope the rest follow suit.
I am, however, besotted with Dero Goi. Sure, he loves to hear himself talk, and he clearly never met a mirror he didn't seduce, fuck, and leave a logy, sated mess amongst the bedclothes, but he has such a sense of whimsy mixed with his reserved sense of humor. Last night, I found a video of him poking fun at the self-important literary establishment by conducting a "serious literary critique" of a "great novel for our times, which turned out to be a German children's book involving a penguin. When he started comparing the events of the book to themes in Faust, I laughed until I nearly choked to death. It's all rather dry and probably of little interest to anyone without a minimal knowledge of German and years of suffering silently through those interminable college lit courses wherein some failed auteur waxed philosophical about weighty tomes like Hardy's Jude the Obscure or the collected works of James Joyce and tried unsuccessfully to draw labored comparisons between those narratives and current events, so I won't repost it, but I'd laughed any harder, I'd've prolapsed my asshole and regurgitated my innards like a startled sea cucumber.
Dear social justice language popo:
"Retard" is a painful word. So is "spazz". But I don't care how loudly you shout or how tightly you clench your ass cheeks for great justice, you will never convince me that "twit" is an ablist term. I don't care how determinedly you torture its etymology. The fact is that most words people use to describe a person of dubious intelligence can likely be traced back to use against mentally-disabled people. "Imbecile". "Idiot." "Simpleton." "Fool." "Dullard". "Peon." "Dunderhead". "Dolt." All of these are terms used against the stupid and feckless and those who put their brains on autopilot and wander through their daily lives with their thumbs up their asses. They are contemptuous terms, and society reserves a healthy dose of contempt for its broken. Hence, it uses these terms and many more--most of them far less couth than the aforementioned against them. It is perhaps unfortunate and definitely unkind.
But--and follow me here--disabled people haven't cornered the market on stupidity. No, that is an equally-opportunity affliction, one from which an alarming number of perfectly able folks suffer. There are scores of beautiful people who are dumber than a box of hammers. Contrary to the rantings of the ultra-sensitive sects of the social justice movement, stupidity exists. And because it exists, society has a right to describe it as best it might. With words like "moron". "Idiot." "Dolt". "Imbecile." "Fool". "Empty-headed lackwit." "Twit." That is what words do. They make concrete the abstract, the picture we all see in our heads when we stir our thought soup and watch the pictures float to the surface. Words describe the taste on our tongue just before it twitches to life and unspools the pictograph inside our brains. Words are the Post-It notes of human ideas. Most humans recognize stupidity when they see it, and so they have created a word set for it, and so long as they apply it to all the incidents thereof that they recognize, they should not be considered ablist terms of OMG oppression.
Idiots exist. Morons exist. Dolts exist. Twits exist. So do imbeciles and dullards. I'm not going to pretend they don't by erasing legitimate language from the lexicon. The words have committed no sin, and anyway, erasing them does no good. Even the dullards can be inventive, and if the language police succeed in quashing these words, then the collective will of the stupid and banally-cruel will exert itself in the creation of new terms with which to unwittingly describe themselves as they gleefully hurl them at others. Want proof? Let's look at the evolution of language as it pertains to disability:
-Cripple(d): This was a perfectly acceptable word to describe the physically disabled not long ago. It was in the Bible, and when I was a patient there, Shriners' Hospital for Crippled Children did ground-breaking surgeries. But someone decided it was insensitive.
-Handicapped: This was also a perfectly serviceable word to describe disabled folks. My mother called me this. So did my teachers. I rode the handicapped bus. I wasn't traumatized. It was just the word for what made me different than the other children. It was the word that denoted things meant just for folks like me. When I was little, it was comforting, code for "my stuff". When I got older, it lost some of its luster because it sounded so ugly on teenaged tongues. Someone decided it was insensitive.
-Disabled: Still a serviceable word, and the de facto code for services and resources set aside for disabled folks. There are disabled seats on buses and trains, and when I see Rammstein again, I will sit in the "disabled seating area." The disabled seating area, by the by, is a patch of concrete, a parking space for a human body. Most people in meatspace still use this word, but it's slowly falling out of favor in the lalala-world of cyberspace.
-Physically-challenged: An aging darling of the Internet social justice crowd. It's also a stupid, onerous word because it implies a challenge that can be overcome if you just tug on those damn bootstraps hard enough.
-Special needs: A wishy-washy term for disability, doubtlessly invented by some dewy-eyed fool who shied away from the atavistic revulsion they felt when they looked at a child whose spine was exposed by Spina Bifida and ashamed of the guilty relief they felt when they looked at their healthy children. This is also an onerous term because it gave bigoted asswipes an outlet for their smug superiority. "Oh, fuck them," they sneer as they pass a person in a wheelchair floundering towards the airplane terminal. "They think they're so goddamned special, they can do it themselves. Entitled asshole!" They tell themselves that disabled people aren't asking but the bare minimum necessary to achieve even the slightest social equity, but demanding "special" deference and dispensations so that we can lie about while they pay for our chalets and BMW wheelchairs and government-subsidized plasma TVs. Thanks a heap, word police.
-Differently-abled: Now we've ascended to the realms of the delusional. This implies that disabled people as a collective possess abilities denied to the able. People who use this term are usually parents in denial or Internet crusaders who have no inkling of what life with a disability truly entails. These folks seem to think that disable people are X-men in waiting who just haven't revealed our badassery yet. Where are my laser-eyes, dammit? I've got some assholes to immolate.
-PWD: The acronym favored by lazy crusaders. Supposedly, it recognizes my humanity by calling me a person before recognizing my disability.
No. Stop. If you need an acronym to remind yourself of my humanity, then your problems cannot be solved by simply changing your vocabulary. I am not special needs. I am not a closet X-man. And I am not a goddamned mnemonic device for people who have trouble finding their empathy in the mornings. I am crippled. I am handicapped. I am disabled. I am a human being who is physically different, and who therefore needs different accommodations in order to live my life. It is not cruelty or self-loathing to acknowledge this. It is the truth. Stark and simple. I am crippled, I am handicapped. I need help doing things. This makes me different, but it does not make me lesser. It should not.
And yet, by attempting to efface these words from the language, the language police are saying exactly that. They are saying that people on the receiving end of these descriptors are lesser, that these words denote that which is worthless and ugly and brutish and pitiful. They are telling me that be be crippled is to be a thing undesirable to anyone, something to be erased, forbidden, unacknowledged. Crippled people are embarrassing, but differently-abled people, those mythical creatures with special abilities as yet unattained by the rest of mankind, well, they're...inspirational.
No, thanks. I'm going to go right on using words like crippled and handicapped, and I'm going to keep on using twit and lunatic and idiot, too. Because changing terms changes nothing until you change the attitude behind them, and we haven't even found that road yet. Want proof of that, too?
Once "retard" was supposedly vanquished from polite fannish circles, it was duly replaced by the word "speh." The bigots simply found another bit of invective to hurl, and this one came with a drooling smiley. From a "retard", which is at least a word, to a single grunted syllable of unmistakable scorn. What progress. Keep up the good work, you tireless keyboard warriors for linguistic utopia. I'm sure your tireless work on my behalf will keep me warm while I'm standing in front of the utterly inaccessible concert hall and wondering how I'm going to get inside.
Congratulations, Rammgents! According to Ticketmaster, the Rosemont Horizon is sold out. Let's hope the rest follow suit.
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