Remember when the word bitch referred to a female dog or colloquially, to a female human who wasn't very nice? Remember when it was a one syllable word?
Today it seems odd to apply the calumny only to a female. To many it conjures up a sexually submissive prison inmate and it seems odder to pronounce it without the usually grotesque attempt to mimic the grossest racially stereotypical dialect.
It's as though our popular culture, while avoiding proscribed words, none the less has become a racist minstrel show with white people in baggy pants, backwards hats and thousand dollar shoes, calling each other "ho." Hispanics covered head to foot with gang tattoos and young, black men with oversized, beltless pants all striving to illustrate the basic shiftlessness, ignorance and propensity to steal so dear to the heart of racists everywhere. How far have we come from "I am a man" to "I am a bee-otch." Do young people still dream of being able to say "I am a doctor, I am an engineer, I am a professor, I am a poet, I am a president?" Or is it all about conformist, commercial self expression through self mutilation and degradation?
Am I old fashioned or clueless when I cringe at the echoes of "whasssuuuuuup beee-otch" in places filled with white teenagers? Sure, the trend across the entire ethnic spectrum of our "culture" is to dress like a bum, talk like a jailbird and make fun of 'da soots' but I can't think of a nation that has had a desirable outcome to such a cultural inversion. China's Cultural Revolution comes to mind and I can't help wondering how the ever immaculately dressed Dr. King might feel about his sacrifice if he were here to see this confirmation of the idea that a black man's place is in jail or at some level far below dignity and respectability.
Of course it's probably only one facet of America's infatuation with the low-life and contempt for civilization and its values. Anyone not part of the beggars opera must think he's better than the rest of us, after all and God knows, the rest of us are all about beer, dope, payday loans, unemployment and parole officers -- bee otch.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteTo me, some humans seem desperately determined to mark themselves as utterly utter by dint of all sorts of ridiculous strategies. If you need forty-three nose rings to signify that you're a true original, I'm guessing you probably aren't. You'd probably do best to keep your silly beak closed so as not to shatter at least the momentary illusion of rebellious differentness that your looks might otherwise generate.
That snarkily said by this dinosaur with close-cropped pin feathers and no body markings other than some naturally occurring khaki camouflage, I've met and known people who have body art, and some of them are brilliant – it just depends on the person.
As in most cultural production, there are a certain number of intelligent, creative people doing stuff and a huge herd of pathetically unoriginal chuckleheads who just do what the Mad Men tell them to do: so they can be like everybody else, so they can belong, so they can have a ready-made identity. I guess in that light it's understandable, if scarcely bold.
Don't most people look straight-up for the same reasons? The only advantage they have is that at least they're not pretending to be hipsters. Of course, that plus is perhaps counterbalanced by the promotion of vapidity as the wisdom of the ages, of empty-headed consensus substituting for self-reflection and firm moral values, blah blah blah.
I remember that when I was in graduate school, a rather stolid old prof of British Romantic studies brought in as a guest a young fellow who looked like some kind of hippy-yippy-flippy-goth –- infinitely many piercings, continuous tattoos, etc. Know what? He was a wonderful scholar of the poet William Blake, and I suspect that he and the fiery visionary would have got on famously. Come to think of it, he looked like an exotic figure in one of Blake's magnificent engravings. Maybe "Los." Fearful symmetry, man, fearful symmetry.
Let a hundred Tygers burn as brightly as they please. I'm fine with that. It's just the dimly smoldering, mass-produced, culture-of-despairing-defiant-criminality-worshiping jackasses that get me down on occasion. Nothing good is likely to come from them, though in the end, I suppose, they're nowhere near as "fearful" as they pretend to be.
The problem is that the sheer weight of their ignorance seems to be dragging down the level of culture in Glorious Nation of US & A to the LCD. Humans definitely need improving, and that should be a key aim of culture, shouldn't it?
Now dinosaurs, they're perfect. Or rather, their don't-know-nothingness is their perfection. Hard-wired as toasters, you see.
A month ago I attended a family wedding where the bride and groom wore dreadlocks, tattoos, and piercings. The maid-of-honor was also duly dreadlocked [hers were dyed in various colors: blue, green, and rose], she sported piercings on her cheeks, nose, chin, and chest, with tattoos on her arms, I think it's called "arm cuffs?" I can't remember.
ReplyDeleteThe bride and groom exchanged roses, shortbread, and finally each other's dreadlocks in addition to their vows in a ceremony presided over by a shoeless woman in white flowing robes and daisies in her hair. Lake Champlain was the backdrop. All of these young people have graduate degrees in subjects I've never heard of.
It actually was an enjoyable wedding. But I felt like an exceedingly out-of-touch and confused old auntie.
Who needs body piercings and tattoos when you've got ... camouflage!!! Visions and revisions to suit every mood. Black for Bach. Palm court green for Chopin. Gentian for a Gymnopรฉdie. Makes everything else look like gaudy clownfish.
ReplyDeleteI don't claim to be up to date, but here on the West Coast, usually the only men that refer to other men as bitches are mostly gay. I would suspect that it is generally a term of endearment. I never understood what bee-yotch really meant for either sex. I did clue in when Robert Townsend famously asked, "Hey funny man, what's the idea of calling my ho' a bitch?" That was hilarious, one time about twenty-something years ago.
ReplyDeleteI guess that it mostly means that the speaker is an insufferable idiot. Bitch is already an insult. It doesn't need a stupid pronunciation to imbue it with added meaning. This is an example of one person saying something years ago that was unfortunately picked up by the dumbshit squad.
SK,
ReplyDeleteOut of touch - well, maybe, but these things are as much a departure from and rejection of the culture than has happened -- perhaps ever. I don't know what confuses me more, the rage to be weird or the parallel urge to be "casual" which is now defined as dressing like the poorest of the homeless.
Junior,
Dumb comments, jokes and clothing cliche's seem to have an infinite shelf life. How long has it been since wearing your hat backwards was an act of anything but the most mindless conformity?
But this Bee Yotch thing is a damn insult to black people, in my opinion.
Dino,
ReplyDeleteI can't improve on your comments, but it's usually the helpless who have to dress up like something fearsome and it's only the little dinosaurs who have feathers.
Well...
ReplyDeleteBack in the 1970s when bitch only had two meanings, my wish-she-was-my-girlfriend asked me if she was a good bitch or a bad bitch?
Only time in my life I ever came up with the repartee on the spot...
"You're the best bitch I know!"
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteThanks -- isn't the ridiculous new pronunciation split up the way it is to avoid showing the guts to use the word itself, however ill-advised that may be? That's the impression I've had, but I'm a lizard, so what do I know?
Life's a be-yotch and then you die-yotch? It doesn't even rhyme.
ReplyDeleteI don't know any black people who actually talk that way and I suspect the usage marks the user as a passive racist milquetoast who thinks he'd be more interesting with a bit of fake penitentiary panache.
American life seems to have become a game of quen es mas Macho what with the massive military vehicles we drive and the emblems of dark ages barbarism we love so much and with all the talk about testicles and misogyny. Perhaps modern life with its insistence upon safety and helplessness is behind it, perhaps not, but it annoys me even more than those who pretend to revere the indigenous Americans after having stolen the continent and killed off the vast majority of them do.
Perhaps gleefully and relentlessly pronouncing whore as 'ho' and all that other exploitation of stereotypes is just a more acceptable kind of racist mockery - I don't know, but to me it stinks and it degrades our common language and our fellow Americans.
But back to the original point, freedom of religion does not convey the right to break laws, or so I've been led to believe, else the Church of Fogg and its "do as thou wilt" doctrines are going to get mighty popular in my house.
If a 'Christian' hospital can't throw a prostitute or an unbeliever out of the emergency room, it can't claim exemption from a Federal health care standard.
FJ,
ReplyDeleteAh, the good old one syllable bitch days. Life was simpler.
Dino,
"I'm a lizard, so what do I know?"
To much to be safe in our cowardly new world, I suspect. Questioning the wisdom of the LCD can be perilous.
But life's a be-yotch and then you die-otch doesn't work except in one of those Rap things where you pretend something rhymes by putting a rolled up sock in your mouth along with a front bumper from a '53 Buick.
I suspect it's a stealthy bit of minstrel show racism and I don't happen to know any black people who talk like that.
But to get back to the freedom is slavery bit, I've long been lead to believe that being a religious group does not allow you license to do things others must, by law, do or not do. Specifically, if a church affiliated hospital cannot refuse to treat people who are sinners or heretics, it cannot refuse to provide Federally mandated benefits to its employees.
If this is not true, then the Church of the Holy Fogg, where "do as thou wilt" is the doctrine, is going to make for some interesting times around here.