On a social network last week, a minor kerfuffle erupted when I posted a picture of Super, Man!
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| photo via Liveleak.com |
... not one of my own original Photos by Jglo ... but I found it online and linked to it, to illustrate a point I was trying to make. Actually, I was using it as a punch line -- to illustrate "accomplishment" after reciting a children's poem -- and this is where I was perhaps misguided.
Someone called me out on my attempted humor - which, in retrospect, relied on a visual version of the "retard" / "retarded" pejorative ... though when I posted the image, I wasn't thinking so far ahead. I was just thinking like I was ten, when most of us used to laugh and clap around "like retards", for comic effect.
Like Jerry Lewis ... or Don Knotts ... or Buddy Hackett ... or any number of rubber-faced, googly-limbed, weird-voiced childfolk, who built careers, if not legends, by "playing retarded".
Or franchises. Dumb and Dumber, anyone? Little Britain's Lou and Andy (speaking of 'kerfuffles') ... How about Mitch Fatel? Some Adam Sandler ... That fat one who lived and died like Belushi.
All are, arguably, "offensive". In the same way that I offended a few people by posting a picture I found to be contextually appropriate ... I suppose I could have just written, "golf clap".
But my point is the hypersensitivity and hypocrisy which pervades American culture, and society at large. When I was 18, having just come to New York and attending college, there was a discussion in some class about immigration. From the second or third row of the classroom, I piped up humbly that newly arrived immigrants, in order to arrive (and stay) in the United States, should be required to learn and speak at least a fundamental English ... which, some 25 years later (and nearly 400 years after the pilgrims landed), is still the nation's first language.
This simple suggestion of common sense, which remains my opinion and is shared by many, did not go down well. A girl in the front row nearly snapped her neck whipping around to face me, and snarled, "A man named Adolf Hitler once believed the same thing!"
WTF??, I would have thought (if "WTF" had been around then). Really? That's Hitleresque? A suggestion that new arrivals to any country be required to have at least an awareness of that country's language??
As a result of the unexpected smackdown, I spent the next four or five years in classrooms not opening my mouth - and eventually, not graduating from college.
Now last week, a woman on a social network demanded to know what my kids eat for breakfast -- what I must feed them -- because I posted a picture of Super, Man!
My startled response was to request that my own post be deleted ... which it was, together with, more disturbingly, the entire thread (an innocuous, if maddeningly pretentious, thread about Poetry). No longer ten years old, I could see the woman's POV and understood how young Super, Man! might have upset, perhaps even "offended", her.
And this time, I let hypocrisy win.
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| "Song and Dance (Man!)", ©Jeff Glovsky |
