Who’s Oppressing Whom? – The Dispatch

Dear Reader (Including members of the Bailey Beach Club Diversity Committee who may suddenly be too busy to read this newsletter),

I want to talk to you about everything going on right now.

Unfortunately, according to Brandeis Universitys Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Centers Oppressive Language List, I just oppressed you.

See if you can figure out why. Ill wait. Give up?

Ill forgive you for not knowing this, but apparently the phrase everything going on right nowdamn, I did it to you againis oppressive. Why? Because, I defecate you negatory, Being vague about important issues risks miscommunication and can also avoid accountability. So, if I say, everything going on right now in reference to police brutality, or the pandemic, I might be letting our oppressors off the hook.

So let me be more specific. When I say everything going on right now, Im referring to garbage like this. And the last thing I want to do is let the people responsible for this linguistic oppression off the hook.

Some more examples:

Brandeis also wants you to stop using the term trigger warning because the word 'trigger' has connections to guns for many people; We can give the same heads-up using language less connected to violence.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a report on how to deal with drones. Thats a legitimately important subject. Fortunately, they did such a bang up job solving all that, they had time left over to fix the oppressive language of aviation. The FAA Gender-Free Style Guide Recommendations appended to the report call for replacing he and she with they and them, airmen with air crew etc. They also want to do away with cockpit because on occasion masculine crew members have wielded the term cockpit to exclude or undermine femme coworkers.

The Biden White Houses budget proposal refersin one section at leastto people who have babies as birthing persons.

In a similar vein, in an essaynone dare call them op-eds anymorein todays New York Times, a transgender man writes:

We are, all of us, in a constant stage of negotiation with the political and cultural forces attempting to shape us into simple, translatable packages. Trans people, by necessity, are more aware of these forces; that fluency is a strength, and it has afforded us an opportunity to question the stories about the biology of gender that are so foundational to American culture: Do we all really want to co-sign the notion that a uterus, and thus reproductive potential, is how we define womanhood? When a nonbinary person births a child, why must the birth certificate dictate that the person who gave birth is a mother, and what does being a mother even mean, exactly? What might it mean for all parents if mother and father were not such distinct categories in child-rearing? Who benefits from their continuing separation?

Now, I just ranted about the above essay on TheRemnant (out tomorrow), so I dont want to recycle all that here. So let me start with this trigger warning thing to get me to my point.

I have no problem doing away with the phrase trigger warning. Im not a fan of the term or the idea behind it. But let me concede in the spirit of generosity and humility that one doesnt have to be categorical about this. Advising people in advance about disturbing content is perfectly fine with me. Movies have ratings and TV shows have parental advisories, and I find that not just defensible but helpful. Lots of shows depicting suicide these days come with a warning and help-line for those feeling suicidal. That seems like a better social compromise than banning depictions of suicide.

No, my main problem with the way trigger warnings have been deployed is the broadness and nature of what theyre warning about. My second biggest problem is that the science behind trigger warnings is garbage.

The systematic violence of the English language.

But thats not why Brandeis wants to get rid of the term. It thinks trigger is associated with violence. Okay, if were going to take that seriously, lets note that the word trigger derives from the Dutch word trekker, from which we get trek. Today, trek means a journey, but it originally meant to pull, like a wagon pulled by oxen (hence the evolution of the word). Trigger means something you pull; it may indeed be associated with violence, but only in the minds of people who make that association.

But if words associated with violence have to goMuadDib!there are far deadlier killing words out there. For instance, our political discourse is drenched in military language: battleground states, ad blitzes, taking flak, over the target, scorched earth, political crusade, pyrrhic victories, skirmish, belligerents, political ambushes, nuclear options, war on poverty, etc.

In fact, our entire language is littered with the corpses of dead metaphorswords and phrases that no longer mean what they once did because we forgot where they came from.

Hotshot is derived from heated ordnance used to set fire to enemy ships. When football players go over the top, its an homage to trench warfare from World War I. So are phrases like in the trenches and no mans land. If I tell my daughter to get moving on the double, Im using the language of war preparation.

Now, because Im a logophile, I dig this stuff.

But in this context, Im perfectly willing to ask, So frickn what? If youre working freelance you dont mean youre a medieval mercenary willing to fight for whichever side pays you enough. Im writing this on deadline, which means I have to deliver it by a specific time. But deadline was born as a Civil War term for the border around a military prison that you could be shot without warning if you crossed. Nobody tell the folks at MSNBC that their show Deadline: White House is steeped in the language of incarceration and total war.

Words change versus changing words.

Now, if youre a clever sort, you might argue that Im making the same point as the folks playing word games. After all, you could say, Sure, trigger used to mean X, but now some people think it means Y, and the new meaning is trigger I mean, disturbing.

But is it? Ive never met anyone who felt aggressed against when I said something like, Lets pull the trigger on this. Are we going out for Mexican or Chinese?

Ill happily concede that such people must exist, but who died and made them the bosses of everybody? Moreover, assuming these people exist, how many of them are looking to find a reason to be offended? If there are 10,000 people in America who feel oppressed by the term trigger, Id guess 9,950 of them are the kind of people who walk the earth looking for reasons to be a pain in the ass. Indeed, thats one of the problems with trigger warning culture: It trains people to be pains in the ass because it incentivizes the practice of taking offense by rewarding people with power and attention. Victimhood is powerful these days.

This is why newsrooms and universities are infestedsorry if that word offends youwith little linguistic Maoists searching out reasons to take offense. And its why every day we get manufactured outrages. The Pharisees at the Brandeis Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center have a business model designed around the idea of constantly scouring the language for reasons to take offense. And that Orwellian model requires constantly changing acceptable language to catch people for being offensive.

The Mother of All Asininities

And thats the real problem: This war on oppressive language is itself oppressive. The organic evolution of language from below is inherently small-d democratic. Its undirected, emergent, and unavoidable.

Using the commanding heights of the culture, never mind the power of the federal government, to bully and shame people out of using the term mother is oppressive. Its an imposition from above. Its also staggeringly, awe-inspiringly stupid.

Lets start with oppression. Cultural erasure is a hot topic these days. And you know whats a deeply embedded concept in many culturesincluding our own? Mothers. (Its also a pretty deeply embedded concept in medicine, biology, and science generally, which is something to keep in mind when you hear these people say, I believe in science.)

Im honestly offended that I have to explain this. Ask any black, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Catholic, Muslim, Jew, or literally any other normal person, and theyll tell you what mother means to them, both personally and as a concept. Even for people who hate their mothers, motherhood is a powerful thing (if it werent, they probably wouldnt hate their mothers). In my experience, the people who invest the most meaning in motherhood are colloquially known as mothers. But its really not limited to them.

The phrase, as American as apple pie allegedly gained widespread popularity as as American as motherhood and apple pie during World War II. Reporters would ask American soldiers what they were fighting for, and a common response was, For mom and apple pie.

Then theres Mother Nature, and oh, forget it. I refuse to keep going. Putting me in the position of having to explain that motherhood is central to vast oceans of culture, faith, literature, language, norms, laws, and other concepts in which virtually all human civilizations are rooted is infuriating.

We didnt get rid of the term mother to spare the feelings of orphans or homosexual couples. Why invest in transgender people and their sense of grievance and discomfortas sincere and real as it may bethe moral authority to erase all of that?

Im not advocating cruelty toward transgender people asking to get rid of the word mother. But I am saying that the answer should be an emphatic, albeit polite, No. Thats not going to happen.

The answer should be No on the merits: 99 percent of society should not be held hostage to the feelings of 1 percent (a generous enumeration of their representation in the population, by the way). Motherhood is too important, too entrenched, and too meaningful to get rid of. Especially when you consider that the word and concept was here first and was never intended to give offense. If I move to a country that drives on the left side of the road, I dont get to scream that Im being oppressed by having to adjust accordingly. Admittedly, trans people arent literal immigrants. But they are essentially new arrivals culturally. Showing a little deference to the supermajority culture isnt too much to ask.

And, as I noted on TheRemnant, if youve spent the last 30 years hearing feminists and Handmaids Tale fans denounce conservatives for reducing women to mere breeders, Id like to know why calling them birthing persons is some great victory.

Again, you dont have to be opposed to everything the language police are doing. I for one think removing the term niggardly from everyday parlance is no great loss, even if the word has nothing to do with the homonymic racial epithet. But intent does matter. The FAAs linguistic commissars want to get rid of cockpit because on occasion masculine crew members have wielded the term cockpit to exclude or undermine femme coworkers. Maybe they should just put more energy into disciplining people who use cockpit in an offensive way? I mean, the kind of person determined to harass women with the word cockpit will not be left powerless to continue doing so if you mandate the use of flight deck instead. If anything, taking away the word creates opportunities for fresh cockpit jokesLets call it the gelded pit! Also, that way, you wont have to use idiotic adjectives like masculine and femme to describe crew members. I mean, who knew Luca Brasi was so far ahead of his time?

Turning mother into an offensive or even simply antiquated term is unfair and unjustified cultural oppression, exploiting the admirable American desire to treat people decently. Simply put: Its asking too much.

Which brings us to the stupidity of all this. The answer should be No for another reason: Its never going to happen. People arent going to stop using the term. And because its never going to happen, good and decent progressives, sympathetic to the struggles of trans people, should pull them aside and tell them, Look, that dog wont hunt. Pick your battles.

And they should say this to trans allies for their own sake. Nobody is going to go nuts if individual trans people refer to their own utero-American spawning vessels as birthing persons. But if you want to invite a backlash against trans people, start hectoring and bullying people to refer to their own mothers as birthing people. Start correcting old ladies who gush about how much they love being a grandmother, Excuse me, thats offensive! You are a grandbirthingperson!

See how that goes for your cause.

Lets concede the whole of the argument: Enlightened people should abandon the word mother entirely. Well, if Joe Biden and the Democrats energetically campaigned on eliminating the concept of motherhood in 2020, Donald Trump would be president today and Republicans would have comfortable majorities in Congress. What Im saying here isnt merely criticism, its constructive criticism.

By all means, youre free to fall back on the time-honored progressive practice of rolling your eyes at conservatives making too big a deal out of some PC tempest in a teapot. But this smug, hand-waving response misses how politics works. These stories arent isolated, theyre cumulative. The backlash against critical race theory may seem sudden, but it built up over decades. Standing against political correctness has gotten many a Republican elected because all of these dots in the cultural landscape form a picture a lot of people dont likeand for good reason.

Youre free to describe yourself however you like. Thats freedom. But relentless language policing is culturally oppressive, and its no less so even if, in an unwitting homage to Herbert Marcuse, you claim youre doing it to fight oppression.

Various & Sundry

Canine update: All is well with the beasties. But I dont have too much to report because I was gone for most of the week. I even had to post reruns on my Twitter account. I did get to chase the Dingo on Monday, which is always fun. The only big news development this weekand its big according to canine journalistic standardsis that the Fair Jessica has issued a fatwa that the girls dinner be boring for a while. Normally, we chop up some protein, leftover chicken or steak and put it on top of the kibble. The girls were getting blas about it, so Jess has put them on a straight kibble dinner regimen until their sense of entitlement abates. Theyre not happy about it. Theyve talked to their union rep, theyve filed formal grievances etc. The only glimmer of hope is that TFJ leaves for a drive to Utah tomorrow, leaving me in charge of their menu. No word on how I will deal with this issue.

ICYMI

Last Fridays G-File

Last weekends drive-time Ruminant, featuring a farewell to Mr. Nick Pompella

The weeks first Remnant, with poverty expert (and Brookings sympathizer) Scott Winship

The war over CRT continues to irritate

The members-only midweek G-File on progressive kookery surrounding In the Heights, written from the Oklahoma wilds

The weeks second Remnant, a supplemental episode on separation of church and state

The case for humility in politics

And now, the weird stuff

How deep is your love?

Fishy dealings at Subway

Relationship goals

Not quite what William Peter Blatty had in mind, but

The Midwestern sensibility

California, rest in peace

Love, Ukranian style

Correction, June 26: Yes, we know the headline should have asked, Whos Oppressing Whom,? not Whos Oppressing Who? Wed like to say it was a tribute to Aretha Franklin, but it had more to do with Friday rush hour. Thank you to our Twitter copy editors.

Original post:

Who's Oppressing Whom? - The Dispatch