Timmy is a nine-year-old boy. His father died when he was young, and his mother remarried recently. He and his stepfather get along OK, but they’ve still got a lot of getting to know each other to do. One evening, he wakes up and wants to get himself some Oreos, so he goes over to his mom’s room to ask her if he can open them.

What should he see when he opens the door than his mother and his stepfather banging away. She yells loudly, and he looks back and - continuing to go about his business - grins, snickers a little, gives the kid a big thumbs-up, and tells him to shoo.

His stepfather and his mother laugh it off and keep going, and long story short, he wakes up the next morning feeling refreshed and happy, because good sex will do that for you. Thinking that (as he enjoys doing) he’ll make his wife breakfast before she comes to, he throws on his bathrobe and trots down the stairs.

When he rounds the corner, he sees Timmy with his grandmother spread-eagled on the table, banging the old gray mare. He screams like a little girl. ‘Jesus Christ, Timmy! Oh God - what in the hell is this? You need help!’

Timmy, grinning, laughs: ‘Not so funny when it’s your mom, is it.’

(My dad is really good at what he does - to wit, medicine, engineering, and plumbing the depths of human depravity. That is what you have to thank for today’s inspiring little parable.)

[nota bene: This is a series of personal recollections. My memory is horrible and I vouch for no specific facts or dates; any event I describe occurring I do vouch for, although the specifics of it and when it happened are up in the air.]

Picture the sort of person who will make a weekly habit of beating off to clips of Winston Churchill saying famous things, demonstrating what his admirers mistake for resolve. Put a khaki shirt on him - a paramilitary affiliation, appropriate enough for this Little League fascist. Keep this image in mind. You’ll need it later.

The Boy Scouts were set up out of a megachurch, called - simply enough - Central Christian Church. The Boy Scouts have various classist and authoritarian instincts built into their organizational structure; they are centralized under a single leader, the Scoutmaster, answerable to nobody, and surrounded by lackeys with positions of responsibility unaccompanied by authority. It is the perfect way to teach boys - and their fathers, for that matter - that life, and especially adulthood, is a succession of increasingly burdensome obligations to authority without any personal autonomy; the only possible reward is a larger number of bulliable subordinates. And like good evangelicals, their contempt for women was boundless. The Promise Keepers were in vogue at the time, and their vague, self-congratulatory vows not to beat women for being filthy, stupid animals seemed to stop well short of letting women do anything constructive.

My mother was a cub scout leader, see. My father got involved when he could, but he completely lacked the time - had a busy schedule. And my mother wanted us to have something like the Cub Scouts - complete with camping, useful skills, and opportunity to socialize - in our lives. She ran the den out of our house most of the time, and all concerned were very pleased with themselves.

A succession of moves lead us to a number of boy scout troops. The megachurch one lasted us the longest; it was the one that, as the homophobia rocked the organization (and my parents, who respected Gore a great deal, were bombarded continuously with Bushie urban legends, shitty jokes, and other bullshit spam), drove first me and later the rest of my family out of the Amerikaner Hitlerjugend. (That and I was never particularly good at the bondage stuff.) Read more »

One of my favorite little hobbies is language usage as a sociological instrument, especially political. The topic of dog whistles is especially amusing and diverting to me - but not exactly what I primarily like to look at.

Some words, or some usages of words, are so unusual outside of the context of a political fringe that using them almost immediately identifies you as a member of it, or at least someone who spends time primarily around members of it. This occurs by one of two ways: either it is from popular literature in a certain circle or it is based on a shared ideology that doesn’t really exist outside of that circle. The closer one is to the fringe when learning English (be it as a child or, more prominently, in ESL), the more identifiable one’s politics are this way.

There are a few favorite examples of mine, and I’ll leave aside the growing collection of hobby-horses ridden by over-enthusiastic Slavic neoliberals (’communistic’ and such dated usages clearly denoting a steady diet of Voice of America) for now. My single favorite is the equation to suicide - it’s not a single usage so much as a chain of them (’philosophy/culture/etc. of self-destruction/suicide/etc.’), and it’s very popular among Randroids because Rand herself used it. One of her pithier little bits of nonsense attempts to prove it, and Rand being who she was, you know exactly how this ‘proof’ reads: written with the formal structure and pompous tone of the ancient Greeks the Randies love so much, intending an aura of intellect by cribbing obsessively from these gayest of history’s men and instead falling into ridicule.

To cut it short, she calls capitalism the stuff of man’s nature (invoking Darwin - albeit, and you’ve got to love these people’s relationship with ‘reason’, in a pretty confrontational tenor), considers self-interest vital to survival, and then poses that altruism is self-negation, ergo death.

There is a gaping hole in this argument so simple that only someone with a sexual fetish for the pretenses - that is, that capitalism is reasonable and reasonable self-interest is the only way to survive - could ignore or attempt to work around it. That is: everyone dies. Everyone. Carnegie? Dead, sure. But J.P. Morgan? Also dead. Rockefeller? Dead. The women who made his morning coffee? Dead, and probably later. Bill Gates? Not gonna see 2050.

If you’re religious, and also you have a really warped concept of righteousness, I guess there’s a way around that. But ‘rational’ argument, without recourse to an invisible man who loves the wealthy, fails decisively on this point. If they are cornered with it, they’ll generally gamely struggle for a few minutes before calling everyone else in the room a bunch of suicidal Marxists. And speaking of -ists, there’s another uniquely ideological usage: Day By Day’s brilliant ‘Kantian nihilism’, a phrase that would make any student of philosophy past his sophomore year laugh and which makes no sense outside of the deliciously absurd world of the Randroids - where Kant and nihilists, being mutual enemies of the purely rational St. Ayn, were clearly cut from the same collectivist cloth. (And don’t even get me started on Ayn Rand’s enemies. I’ve got a lot to disagree with Kant about, but her puerile squabble with his legacy over ontology is amazing in its brazen illiteracy - only a peasant who had by some cruelty of fate acquired letters would devote serious energy to slapping at Kant’s nebulous-where-not-banal ontological ramblings, and in doing so think she had given herself the air of a thinker.)

Ah, I could go on about Randroids all day, but that’s not what Djur is paying me for. (Evidently, he is paying me to fight high-powered insiders like Barack Obama and his discouraging lack of a tough foreign policy to fight our homeland’s enemies - probably why I haven’t gotten a check yet.) Allow me to share with you one of my favorite odd usages of the political right: ‘pimp’.

There’s no one specialized form of this, but - true to their hideous nature - the most common one one encounters from wingnuts is ‘welfare pimp’. (I guess some stereotypes die really hard - for instance, all of them if you’re a bigot.) This, which seems to be the horrible, racist ur-form, implies that any politically prominent member of the black community is simply finagling welfare payments for them to ride their lazy race’s decadent, leeching satiation to office. Never mind that in a literal reading of this the only person who could possibly be tarred as a welfare pimp would be history’s most crooked Welfare bureaucrat, for legislators have fairly limited street-level visibility and almost no power over the comings and goings of their local constituency. (Besides the power to get pork funneled - but pork typically being white as the driven snow, you never hear about pork pimps.) This term, which only really makes sense in the first place if one’s definition of ‘pimp’ is ‘cunning and/or exploitative black man’, slowly generalized to imply anyone in the black community doing anything (one heard of ‘disaster pimps’ after Katrina), and later to more general, less specifically racist ends.

I can get behind the usage of ‘pimp’ in a manner so as to imply the pimp to be an exploitative, destructive asshole. And in the Candyland the Republicans inhabit - where you can live like a king on less than $10,000 in a big city, tax cuts increase government revenue, and Party can always find you - anyone basing their political appeal on welfare could indeed be classified as that. But the more general use of the verb to imply any kind of exploitation has to keep in mind that it’s attached to a very, very ugly reality for men, women, and other; black, white, and Jewish; young, old, and fat alike.

You have to be inundated in a world where ‘pimp’ refers to uppity serviles using their limited resources in a shady, devious way to worm their way to the top for the word to completely lose its meaning. It is actively disgusting to refer to a woman pimping her own daughter, and all the more so because the image fixed in many people’s minds of the now-adult Chelsea Clinton is the gangly young girl noted pill enthusiast Rush Limbaugh referred to as a dog. (I remain convinced Oxy is the sort of drug you pop before a high school policy debate in eager anticipation of calling your opponent a statist for refusing to admit ’separation of church and state’ doesn’t appear in the Constitution, but I digress.)

David Shuster is not just an asshole. He’s a crazy, illiterate asshole who let his attachment to the worst political scene in the 20th century override his common sense. Only in the fevered imagination of such a cretin could the standard relationship between a 28-year-old woman and her politically ruthless presidential candidate mother be described using the word ‘pimp’.

Then again, only in that same imagination could the aforementioned mother be considered the same threat to the conservative order of things that the people 'welfare pimp' was shot at represented. I don't know if anyone is ever going to make the vapid beltway heads eat the shit they've been giving rave reviews of for the last eight years, but the optimist in me says they will. I like to think that the plain wrongness of everything they've had to say will eventually bite them in the ass - but then again, I always was a shameless reality pimp.