Sticks and stones

We have come a short way toward a human society that recognizes our simian heritage of ganging up on, stereotyping, dominating and persecuting one group or another, real or created for the purpose, but it's a long road and I don't expect ever to see the end of it. Does our language reflect our resistance to women who step outside the roles, the personalities, occupations, attitudes and feelings our religion and popular culture allow? It does and a culture that exploits the most vulgar and ignorant and hostile people by making them role models and their ugly ways a thing to be aspired to, can't be expected to change without a fight. It's a fight not only against meanness and small mindedness itself, but against big corporations that make a lot of money marketing the paraphernalia and associating their soft drinks, vehicles, clothes and music with the self righteous vulgarians. And of course we can't count out Big Religion and the martial spirit of war loving America either.

Of course we all have our noses rightly rubbed in some things but there's a tendency to cash in on the enlightened counterculture as well and sometimes to absurd extremes. I was, for instance, reprimanded some time ago by some 30-somethings when talking about Rwanda. I had used the word Batutsi and was immediately identified as a racist because I didn't use the "preferred" term: the Tutsi People. That would of course be cause for someone of that tribe to smile - or perhaps anyone speaking a language of the Bantu family, since that's the proper way to refer to someone of that ethnicity -- just as the Ganda people are Baganda and speak Luganda in the country of Uganda. Sometimes we're just parroting ignorant opinion when looking for ignorant opinion to feel superior to. Sometimes we're using our enlightened purity of thought to be bigots toward others.

In a culture that defines any word by the way the 12 year olds are using it, it's not surprising that we can't even get schools to include American classics that use the "N" word if they were written by a white man like Samuel Clemens. It's easier to call a man who was always on the side of minorities and against slavery a racist, than to recognize the flexibility of the language we invoke every time we use it wrongly. Have we lost the idea that racism, bigotry, prejudice are intentions and not a list of words? Can't we laugh at the righteous feelings we give ourselves for calling a tiger Asian instead of the Asiatic that was preferred before the non-asian word police told us, without adequate explanation, that it was wrong? Has anyone mentioned receantly that "Caucasian" is a racist word? Not likely.

There's something terrible about "Asiatic" that we don't risk enquiring too deeply into but we don't mind giggling and japing at anything about a woman of a certain age by calling her "granny" every time she steps out of the rocking chair and puts down the knitting. I write hundreds of letters, that do no more than get me labeled as "Gramps" because I object to the wisdom and right thinking of the giggling class.

So maybe I can be forgiven for not being as carefully and visibly sensitive to the programs of movements and associations intended to improve the human condition and because it's as often as not misguided toward me and my intentions and my vocabulary. For one thing, the predominant religion of this country, the one people like to say should be substituted for the constitution, is based on stereotyping Jews and in a negative fashion and it's so ingrained in the culture that people who have made a career out being called tolerant and indeed Liberal don't bother to notice it.

I'm not talking about the "Conservative" troll who went after me at The Reaction a while back, calling me a "kike." I'm talking about people like Gary Trudeau, whose "Bloomsbury" strip has advocated for equality, fraternity and all the other good stuff, but last Sunday told us that the "Old Testament" God was crabby and snarky while the "New Testament" was all about Love. Of course that's not born out by the texts, unless it's the Sunday School excerpts selected to deceive small children, but neither is the assertion that Jesus the Pacifist "Snapped" at the "Money Lenders" in the Temple, because of course despite 1800 years or so of pernicious propaganda, it was money changers, not lenders who were there to prevent people from breaking the first and second commandments by bringing Greek or Roman coins into the building. Jesus like his countrymen from Israel, didn't like the sale of sacrificial animals or the Temple itself - otherwise he didn't give a damn about the exchange rate.

So ingrained is the stereotype of the perfidious money grubbing Jew that all our careful and choreographed speech can't prevent us from illustrating our ignorance, bigotry and condescention, particularly while our "beliefs" demand that we preserve it -- and if we were to accept that the Roman Empire killed Jesus, we would have to start all over and clergymen would have to get jobs.

As humans, we all have a strong need to set ourselves off against and superior to the Other and much that we do in the name of ridding ourselves of prejudice, ignorance and arrogance are just another form of it.