Bob dials a number.
DON: Hello?
BOB: Hi, is this Don?
DON: Yes.
BOB: Hi, Don, this is Bob.
DON: Oh. Hi, Bob.
BOB: Hi. Well, I guess I’ll let you go now. Bye.
DON: Okay. Bye.
Bob dials again.
CARL: Hello?
BOB: Hi, is this Carl?
CARL: Yes.
BOB: This is Bob.
CARL: Oh. Hi, Bob.
BOB: Hi. Well, you’re probably a busy guy. I’ll let you go. Bye.
CARL: Bye.
Bob dials again.
TOM: Hello?
BOB: Hello, Tom?
TOM: Yes. Who’s this?
BOB: Bob.
TOM: Hi, Bob. What’s goin’ on?
BOB: Not much, how about you?
TOM: Same old same old.
BOB: Great. Well, I gotta go. I’ve got a bunch of calls to make.
TOM: Okay. Bye.
Bob opens his phone book and makes a list of more people he wants to bond with. His phone rings.
BOB: Hello?
VOICE: Hi, is this Bob?
BOB: Yes.
VOICE: This is Steve.
BOB: Oh, hi, Steve. How are you?
STEVE: Well, that’s the reason I’m calling.
BOB: Oh?
STEVE: Yes. I’m doing fine. So I thought I’d let you know that and maybe save you a call.
BOB: Well, that’s mighty thoughtful of you. Thanks.
STEVE: That’s okay. Well, that’s it. I guess we’ll talk tomorrow.
BOB: You got a deal. Bye.
STEVE: Bye.
Bob scratches Steve’s name from his list of calls and reaches for the receiver. So much still to do.
BITS AND PIECES
• Remember, kids, Mr. Policeman is your friend. Always cooperate with him. Mr. Policeman wants to help you, so you must help Mr. Policeman. Don’t forget, if you refuse to cooperate, Mr. Policeman will beat you to death. Especially if you’re not white.
• I’m not a person who thinks he can have it all, but I certainly feel that with a bit of effort and guile I should be able to have more than my fair share.
• You know what would be fun? To have a set of twins, name them Dumbo and Goofy and then just sit back and see how their personalities develop. I’ll bet they’d really enjoy going to school every day.
• I’d like to point out that during the twentieth century, white, God-fearing, predominately Christian Europe produced Lenin, Stalin, Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.
• Next time you’re in an elevator, blow your nose real loud into your bare hands and then ask if anyone has a Kleenex. Or blow your nose into a Kleenex, open it up and stare at the stuff and say, “Wow! Look at this. It’s all green and yellow.” Then show it to the other people. I guarantee you won’t pass many floors before you have the elevator all to yourself.
• I’ve never seen a homeless guy with a bottle of Gatorade.
• One great thing about getting old is that you can get out of all kinds of social obligations simply by saying you’re too tired.
• You know who you have to admire? A Catholic hit man who blesses himself just before he strangles someone.
• I’ve noticed that a Jew will sometimes use a little paper clip to hold on his yarmulke. Shouldn’t that be God’s responsibility? I mean, you did your part, you put the thing on. Shouldn’t it be God’s job to keep it there? Or why don’t Jews just wear larger yarmulkes that grip the head better? Maybe with an elastic strap that could go under the chin. By the way, I know a hip-hop Jew who wears his yarmulke backward. It’s hard to detect, but I think it looks great.
• Suppose you tried to fuck a woman who had ten personalities, and nine of them said okay, but one of them resisted and tried to fight you off. Would that still be a rape?
• “Where do we go from here?” “Who says we’re here?”
• Because of mad cow disease, they’re now going to leave certain cow parts out of hamburger meat, including the skull. Well, I don’t know about you folks, but I can’t imagine enjoying a hamburger that doesn’t have at least a hint of cow skull in it.
• I was looking in the mirror the other day and I realized I haven’t changed much since I was in my twenties. The only difference is I look a whole lot older now.
• Here’s a safety tip from the Fire Department: Kitchen-grease fires can be quickly and safely extinguished by dousing them with a mixture of benzine and lighter fluid. Apply quickly and stand clear.
TRUE FACT: More children in the United States are molested each year than wear braces.
• I’d like to know the suicide rate among people who call in to radio psychologists and actually follow the advice they get.
• I have no regrets in life. Although I am kind of sorry I never got to beat a man to death while wearing a tuxedo.
• There’s a message window that comes up on my computer screen whenever I type in a command the computer doesn’t like. It says, “Fuck you, I don’t do that.”
• When people use the phrase call it quits, why do they use the plural? It would make more sense to say, “I’m going to call it quit.”
• I recently witnessed something I’ll never forget: an eclipse of the earth. But because it was an eclipse of the earth, there was no place to look. So I looked at the earth. And as I did, the earth got very dark. But the period of darkness was brief because of how close we are to the earth. Remember, kids, never look directly at an eclipse, always get someone else to tell you about it.
• The National Rifle Association reminds its members: Never fire a gun at your own body. Unless you’re trying to seriously injure yourself.
• As a part of those displays that honor rock stars in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I think they should show the amount of money each artist spent on drugs, year by year. Also, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to list which drugs the artists were taking while recording particular songs and albums. Just so we’d all know.
TRUE FACT: In 1733, the Russian army had a treatment for soldiers who suffered severe homesickness. At the first sign of the condition, they buried the soldier alive. That’s good. I like people who go right to the heart of a problem.
• Do you have any perfectly good possessions you don’t need? Send them to Ill Will Industries, where our completely healthy and able-bodied employees earn money by breaking things and rendering them useless. Call Ill Will. Help those who are already doing fine.
• I’m in favor of anything that destabilizes the republic.
• Regarding the Menendez brothers, my opinion is that you can rarely get two kids to agree to kill their parents unless the parents really deserve it.
TRUE FACT: Purina now has a cat food made especially for cats who live indoors. “Indoor cat food for indoor cats.” Meanwhile, I’m sure you’re aware that some human beings have no food at all.
• The worst thing about e-mail is that you can’t interrupt the other person. You have to read the whole thing and then e-mail them back, pointing out all their mistakes and faulty assumptions. It’s frustrating and it’s time-consuming. God bless phone calls.
• I can’t understand a grown man whose nickname is Fuzzy and who actually allows people to call him that. Do these guys really introduce themselves that way? “Hi, I’m Fuzzy.” If some guy said that to me, I would say to him, “Well, you don’t look very fuzzy to me.”
• If you vote once, you’re considered a good citizen. If you vote twice, you face four years in jail.
• In this country, alcohol is hardly ever seen as a drug problem. Instead, we think of it as more of a driving problem.
• Life is simple: Your happiness will be based completely on luck and genetics. Everything comes down to luck and genetics. And when you think about it, even your genetics is luck.
• Seems as though I never get to do the fox-trot anymore.
. What’s going on with these people who tell you to “hav
e a safe trip”? I would never tell a person that. Because if they died it would feel really creepy.
• If I had been in charge of reorganizing the government’s security agencies into a homeland defense organization, I would have divided the responsibilities into two agencies: The Bureau of What the Fuck Was That? and The Department of What the Fuck Are We Gonna Do Now?
READ ONLY
Don’t you get tired of this simpleminded Laura Bush nonsense about children reading, or reading to children, or teaching children to read, or reading to children about teaching, or whatever the fuck it is? What is it with these Bush women? His mother—the big silver douche bag—was into the same sort of nonsense. These women should not be encouraging children to read, they should be encouraging children to question what they read. Content is far more important than the mere act of sitting with your mother and dragging your eyes across text. By the way, I noticed that, apparently, the idea of teaching children to read didn’t work when Barbara tried it on George.
EUPHEMISMS: Political-Interest Groups
Not all the political manipulation of language is done by the big bad politicians. A lot of it comes from people who think of themselves as good and virtuous: the politically active. Activists. As opposed, I guess, to “passiv-ists.” Who should not be confused with pacifists, who are, after all, quite often activists.
GOD HELP US
Let’s start with faith-based, which was chosen by right-wing holy people to replace the word religious in political contexts. In other words, they’ve conceded that religion has a bad name. I guess they figured people worry about religious fanatics, but no one’s ever heard of a faith-based fanatic.
And by the way, none of the Bush religious fanatics will admit this, but the destruction of the World Trade Center was a faith-based initiative. A fundamentalist-Moslem, faith-based initiative. Different faith, but hey, we’re all about diversity here.
The use of faith-based is just one more way the Bush administration found to bypass the Constitution. They knew Americans would never approve of government-promoted religious initiatives, but faith-based? Hey, what’s the problem?
The term faith-based is nothing more than an attempt to slip religion past you when you’re not thinking; which is the way religion is always slipped past you. It deprives you of choice; choice being another word the political-speech manipulators find extremely useful.
CHOOSING SIDES
School choice, and the more sophisticated version, parental choice, are code phrases that disguise the right wing’s plan to use government money to finance religious education. If you hear the word voucher, watch out for the religious right. Again, though, be alert for the more sophisticated term for vouchers: opportunity scholarships.
It’s impossible to mention the word choice without thinking of the language that has come out of the abortion wars. Back when those battles were first being joined, the religious fanatics realized that antiabortion sounded negative and lacked emotional power. So they decided to call themselves pro-life. Pro-life not only made them appear virtuous, it had the additional advantage of suggesting their opponents were anti-life, and, therefore, pro-death. They also came up with a lovely variation designed to get you all warm inside: pro-family.
Well, the left wing didn’t want to be seen as either anti-life or pro-death, and they knew pro-abortion wasn’t what they needed, so they decided on pro-choice. That completed the name game and gave the world the now classic struggle: pro-choice vs. pro-life. The interesting part is that the words life and choice are not even opposites. But there they are, hangin’ out together, bigger than life.
And by the way, during this period of name-choosing, thanks to one more touch of left-wing magic, thousands of abortionists’ offices were slowly and mysteriously turning into family-planning clinics.
And on the subject of those places, I think the left really ought to do something about this needlessly emotional phrase back-alley abortions. “We don’t want to go back to the days of back-alley abortions.” Please. It’s over-descriptive; how many abortions ever took place in back alleys? Or, okay, in places where the entrance was through a back alley? Long before Roe v. Wade, when I was a young man, every abortion I ever paid for took place in an ordinary doctor’s office, in a medical building. We came in through the front door and took the elevator. The three of us. Of course, as we were leaving, the elevator carried a lighter load.
A BUNNY IN THE OVEN?
Then there’s the fetus–unborn child argument. Even leaving aside personal feelings, the semantics of this alone are fun to unravel. To my way of thinking, whatever it is, if it’s unborn, it’s not a child. A child has already been born; that’s what makes it a child. A fetus is not a child, because it hasn’t been born yet. That’s why it’s called a fetus. You can call it an unborn fetus if you want (it’s redundant), but you can’t call it an unborn child. Because—not to belabor this—to be a child, it has to be born. Remember? The word unborn may sound wonderful to certain people, but it doesn’t tell you anything. You could say a Volkswagen is unborn. But what would it mean?
The fanatics have another name for fetuses. They call them the pre-born. Now we’re getting creative. If you accept pre-born, I think you would have to say that, at the moment of birth, we go instantly from being pre-born to being pre-dead. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Technically, we’re all pre-dead. Although, if you think about it even harder, the word pre-dead probably would best be reserved for describing stillborn babies. The post-born pre-dead.
By the way, I think the reason conservatives want all these babies to be born is that they simply like the idea of birth. That’s why so many of them have been born again. They can’t get enough of it.
TARZAN WOULD BE MORTIFIED
Here’s some more left-wing nonsense, this time from the environmentalists, the folks who gave us the rain forest. “Save the rain forest.” They decided to call it that because they needed to raise money, and they knew no one would give them money to save a jungle. “Save the jungle” doesn’t sound right. Same with swamp. “Save the swamp!” Not gonna work. Swamp became wetland! Nicer word. Sounds more fragile. “Save the wetlands.” Send money.
But I think the environmentalists still have their work cut out for them when it comes to global warming and the greenhouse effect. As I see it, these terms are far too pleasant for people to get all worked up about. For one thing, global is too all-embracing for Americans; it’s not selfish enough. “Isn’t globalization that thing that’s been stealing our jobs?” Global doesn’t make it. And warming is such a nice word. Who wouldn’t want a little warming?
Similarly, greenhouse effect will never do. A greenhouse is full of plants and flowers, full of life and growth. Green equals life, house equals shelter. The greenhouse effect sounds like something that gives you life and shelter and growth. You’re never gonna turn something like that into a villain.
And the environmentalists have another language problem, this one concerning nuclear energy: meltdowns. They like to warn us about meltdowns. But a meltdown sounds like fun, doesn’t it? It sounds like some kind of cheese sandwich. “Would you like some fries with that meltdown?”
EUPHEMISMS: POLITICAL-INTEREST GROUPS
A Few Afterthoughts
Here is more of the distorted language of political persuasion:
• Conservatives oppose gun control. Liberals know control is a negative word, so they call it gun safety. That’s about what you’d expect, but it’s hard to find words to describe the following distortion: some of the pro-gun people are referring to gun control as victim disarmament. Isn’t that stunning? Victim disarmament! It takes your breath away. Like a gun.
• Liberals call it affirmative action; conservatives are less positive. They refer to government-mandated quotas, racial preferences and unfair set-asides.
• Rich Republicans want to keep their money in the family, and so the Republican party began to call the inheritance tax (a pro-tax term) the estate tax (a neutral
term), which they later changed to the death tax (an anti-tax term).
• When liberals talk about spending, they call it investing or funding. Funding means spending money. “We need to do more to fund education.” On the other side of the ledger, when Republicans need to raise taxes, they call it revenue enhancement.
• The energy criminals now refer to oil drilling as oil exploration. Instead of Mobil and Exxon, they’d rather you picture Lewis and Clark.
• When the original Enron story was developing, Bush’s people referred to the crimes as violations. They said a review might be necessary, but not an investigation. So I guess if the other guys do it, it’s a crime that should be investigated, but if your guys do it, it’s a violation that should be reviewed.
When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? Page 14
