Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Nobody luxuriates in the English language with more vim than this spinster aunt. I’m positively French about it. But these English-as-the-official-national-language bills currently stinking up the already gross-smelling federal legislature are nothing but xenophobic racist bullshit that can only be interpreted as a giant fuck-you to anyone who mops a floor or mows a lawn or picks a grapefruit in the state of Texas and beyond.

The Senate bill—which passed with the exuberant hell-yeahs of Democrat senators from what I think we can safely say are states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, Florida, Nebraska) overabundant with thriving tribes of illiterate rednecks who wouldn’t know a well-turned English phrase if some moron in a beer commercial stuck his finger in it—cleverly imposes higher standards of English comprehension on would-be immigrants while providing bupkis in funding for ESL (English as a second language) programs. Thus ensuring a recursive infinite feedback loop of failure. But this and other concrete consequences of the bill pale in comparison to the blinding enormity of its symbolic subtext.

It will come as a mind-blowing shock to no one that this English-as-the-Official-Language baloney is not about language at all. It is about white supremacy and fear of Mexicans. Until recently, honkys didn’t have to notice Mexicans or other Hispanic populations if they didn’t feel like it. Their produce just magically appeared in the grocery store, and their water-hogging lawns were manicured by invisible men. But lately the invisibles have been taking to the streets, where, despite global dimming, the light of day incontrovertibly reflects actual human beings.

A lot of human beings. Over 40 million, in fact. It turns out that one out of every seven people in the United States is Hispanic. Which makes remarks like Republican senator Lamar Alexander’s jingoist “English is part of our national identity, it’s part of our blood, part of our spirit” sound incredibly parochial, to say nothing of dimwitted. Lamar needs to get a grip. He’s appealing to his Anglo constituents’ irrational, sentimentalized yearning for a happy-honky Norman Rockwell America that, if it ever existed—which it didn’t—certainly did so at the terrible expense of everyone who wasn’t an upper middle class white male motherfucker. Culture, my onions—and the aforementioned mythical culture in particular—is not worth oppressing 40 million people over. It’s nothing but a set of behaviors upon the successful assimilation of which a given party is ruthlessly judged by her prejudiced peers.

Xenophobic racist bullshit has always been a beloved cornerstone of proto-fascism, so of course it is a specialité de la maison of 21st century American patriarchy. It has been successfully implemented in selling the Iraq war. It sustains the long lines in airports in which honkys can satisfy their rekindled passion for casting suspicious glances at swarthier passengers. And now the federal government proposes it be used to oppress and control the terrifying foreign (read: Mexican) menace.

English has been the official language of California for the past 20 years. Indentured undocumented immigrant labor thrives there under appalling conditions like it does nowhere else in the states. Coincidence?

It has long chapped the Twisty hide that media reports on alarmist boys vs. girls studies constantly portray women as abnormal. Following in this grand tradition, Fox News yesterday announced, in case there were some date rapists out there who’d forgotten, Women Get Drunk, High, and Addicted More Easily Than Men Do.

In the first place, this is hardly a newsflash. In the second place, whatever the impetus for the original study (the title of which is mildly sensational: “Women Under The Influence”), Fox is only reporting it because Dude Nation can’t resist the idea of a drunken addict chick.

I do not dispute the science that suggests that men and women metabolize alcohol differently. I do take issue with the convention in mainstream reportage that assumes males as the default from which women, as freaks of nature, more or less ceaselessly deviate, much to the head-scratching consternation of sexperts. Since patriarchy is so big on characterizing women as aberrant weaklings, and since Fox News is the piehole of patriarchy, the language in the Fox report is a veritable ticker-tape parade for male normativity.

They do not say, for example, that “men, because of their anomalous body chemistry, have an unusually high tolerance for mind-altering chemicals.” Instead they frame it in terms of how women are naturally feeble:

“The study documents how women, pound for pound, not only get drunk or high faster then men, but also become addicted more easily.”

In other words, now at last there is scientific evidence to explain why the world is overrun with stumbling crack whores: women have a biological predilection toward junkiedom which “may be psychological or hormonal.” I.e. “nutso.”

In this 1810 portrait by Karl Vogel von Vogelstein, Joseph de Maistre demonstrates la méthode du doigt by which European royalty have always claimed property such as beer or pussy.

Phil, my secretary, informs me that we’ve gotten “a veritable slew” of emails about the blatant misogyny in—surprise— a light beer commercial. I have not seen it, but Amanda has, which is strange because I have a TV and she don’t. All I can tell you is that this latest entry in the already-crowded field of repellent phallocentric advertising campaigns contains images of dudely morons sticking their fingers into beer bottles, along with the compellingly asinine, soon-to-be-really-tiresome-catch-phrase “you poke it, you own it.”

Of course, the beer company didn’t invent the phrase. In his influential 1789 treatise on private property, De droites du doigt (literally, “The Rights of the Finger”) French philosopher and monarchist Joseph de Maistre declared “You poke it; you may kill it, or give it to your bootblack.” Miller Lite, in an effort to strike a chord with its super-intellectual audience of civic-minded philosophy buffs, is clearly paying homage to one of the great authoritarian conservatives of the French Revolution.

Motherland swirling down the crapper? Just pimp out your women.

Mad Vlad Putin, facing a debilitating population shortfall, wants to pay Russian women to produce human meat on the hoof. Nine thousand bucks per live foal, plus an extra bucket of oats each month. Gosh, was there ever a social crisis that couldn’t be solved by governmental commandeering of women’s uteruses?

The NY Times observes that, because the Russian citizenry stands out among world populations as just one big mass of bodily decay, the dough might be better spent keeping current Russians alive. But patriarchies can’t stand humanitarian solutions—not enough dominance involved. Far better to encourage women to sell themselves. The idea has such a homely, comforting familiarity.

Putin’s nationalist broodmare plan is nuts not just in terms of women’s oppression, but because it won’t even work. Replacing the hundreds of thousands expected to die off in the near future from HIV, tuberculosis, cancer, violence, and assorted other nasty afflictions would, according to the Times, require “feats of fertility unseen in the industrialized world.” Not to mention the insanity, given the unsustainability of the world’s current population, of encouraging higher birthrates among Russians or anybody else.

While I’m at it, I must also wrinkle the Twisty lip over the stupid headline of the aforelinked piece: “Russians, Busy Making Shrouds, Are Asked to Make Babies.” Busy making shrouds? What is this, 1917? Are we on the set of Dr. Zhivago? If anyone even still uses shrouds, it’s a cert they’re made in China.

[Gracias, Sara]