Posted on 11/14/2014 7:52:26 AM PST by Kaslin
The more vulgar the culture gets, the more squeamish the keepers of the rules. The more verbal and visual taboos we break, the greater the threat to free speech.
The National Football League institutes a 15-yard penalty for a football player who uses the N-word. If he uses it a second time, he's benched. This is the word with a cruel racist history, but which is now used as a term of affection if the person of the right color uses it. It's a word heard 500,000 times a day, reports The Washington Post in a front-page story that examines the way the N-word has spread through the popular culture, punctuating rap music, video games and conversational exchanges in stage, screen (of various sizes) and radio. That doesn't include the way the epithet echoes through the hallways of almost any high school.
Although super rapper Kanye West gives permission to his audiences to sing the N-word along with him, as if "permission" were his to give, the permission among more fastidious politically correct elites is not taken. At an alumnae panel discussion at Smith College, where education was presumed to be rooted in academic freedom, Wendy Kaminer, social critic, writer and alumna, said the N-word out loud to make a point about the dangers of censoring Mark Twain's classic, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Her point, obvious to readers looking for literary insights rather than an occasion to take offense, is that the novel reflects the authenticity of experience of the time and place it describes. The critic and her credentials and good sense were nevertheless excoriated as "racist" in the campus newspapers of Smith and neighboring Mount Holyoke College.
Kathleen McCartney, president of Smith, apologized to those who were "hurt" or felt "unsafe" or somehow threatened by Ms. Kaminer's vocabulary, though the title of the panel was called "Challenging the Ideological Echo Chamber: Free Speech, Civil Discourse and the Liberal Arts." Some challenge.
One professor of English literature published Mark Twain's novel never referring to the character Nigger Jim, but calling him Slave Jim. That's easy to do on a computer by hitting the command key "replace," but Mark Twain deserves better, and so do our young students.
Harvey Silvergate, co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, who tracks assaults on the First Amendment and free speech, is alarmed by the increasing number of fainting couches and bottles of smelling salts needed to relieve fainthearted and easily offended college students. "What should be the object of derision, a focus for satire, is instead the subject of serious faux-academic discussion and precautionary warnings," he writes in The Wall Street Journal.
He refers not only to movements to sanitize language but to recent attempts by a number of universities to protect timid sensibilities from trauma and travail with warnings about entire books, where the depiction of violence may offend. Post-traumatic stress disorder, once seen only on a battlefield, has spread to shell-shocked readers who take hits in the psyche on reading how Ahab stabs Moby Dick or Medea kills her kids. Such is the peril to the "intellectually challenged."
The popular culture was once a playground for rebellion, where it was easy to shock with a new dance style, dress or sexual allusion, separating the rising generation from the older one. The mommies and the daddies (as opposed to the folk rockers Mamas and the Papas) were gatekeepers, giving a patina of protection to benign rebellion. This allowed the young to celebrate their passage toward a new identity with creative thinking. Elvis Presley was not photographed from the waist down when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, and his swiveling hips became icons of rock and roll.
Acceptance of vulgarity into the mainstream was once slower, more selective and more judicious. Modern media vulgarity is embraced, imitated and assimilated so quickly that rebellion packs little punch, and witty shock swiftly morphs into dull vulgarity. The early Madonna demonstrated salacious humor in pushing the envelope; the later Madonna became monotonous in her over-the-top extravaganzas of her lady parts.
In our Internet Age, rebellion is ubiquitous and easily usurped, synthesized, monetized, mashed and manipulated, with shallow and diminishing power, flattening emotional responses. Hence, the N-word is everywhere and nowhere: the linebacker or tackle is penalized for using it; Kanye West is applauded for using it; Mark Twain is deprived of aesthetic authenticity; and history is cheated of understanding.
Pogo, the eminent funny-paper philosopher got it just right. "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
N word...what is this N word Im hearing about?
There is kind of a paradox going on in society: taboos against profanity, vulgarity, and sexual explicitness are crumbling, yet we have to be more and more careful what we say. But perhaps it is not a paradox, but simply the imposition of a new orthodoxy.
Here is the deal, from my perspective:
The democrats and republicans are two sides of the same coin playing “good cop, bad cop” with us. Which you think is the good cop depends on your political viewpoint.
Those that hate big business tend to be democrats, and those that hate big government tend to be republican. However, the reality is that they are both working hand in hand to destroy our freedoms and create a serfdom where none of us really have the constitutional rights we think we have.
And the proof is easy to find. A certain pro team is being pressured to change their team’s name because of a few folks who are “offended” by it. And a pro team owner was forced to sell his team because of first amendment protected speach that was ILLEGALLY recorded and released to the public. And he was at the top of the hierarchy!
If you work for a large corporation or the government, you do not really have free speech rights, or second amendment rights, really. Regarding the latter, you have the right to conceal carry, but you can’t bring your gun to your workplace. So, how do you CC during your work week or your commute?
And what is the common enemy of our “two party” system of big government and big business? It is twofold:
1. TEA party
2. Small business.
This is why republicans fight the TEA party even more than they fight democrats. It is because they and the democrats are just different segments of the same group, but the enemy of both is the TEA party.
It kinda reminds me of what Fred Reed said: “America is becoming the worlds first dictatorship without a dictator.”
I’ve never understood this “N” word nonsense.
Black people are allowed to say the “N” word, but the rest of us aren’t allowed to do so.
How is it that what is said to be the most vile thing you can say to an African-American person, is permitted to be said by those same people to each other? How vile is it then?
I’ve heard some liberals say that some words are so offensive that they should never be said by anyone in any circumstances. But then you have the “N” word, which is permissible by some under some circumstances. So what are the real rules regarding profanity??
Then we live in an age of idiocy, in which we stress about American Indian sports team nicknames as part of this, yet allow more and more sexually explicit words and actions to be seen on TV and movies. Sexual profanity is apparently ok, but profanity in any other context, per liberal criteria, must be surpressed.
I see, let’s all just run right out and become libertarians now. Your types don’t even try and hide what you are any more. Anybody can see what your game is: Dems and Repubs same thing, therefore the libertarians are the alternative. I get it.
Must be "niggardly", maybe 10 years ago or so a newscaster was fired for using it on the air.
Your types don’t even try and hide what you are any more.
Ok, that cracked me up. :-P
You don’t know me. It will improve your credibility to avoid summing people up from a post or two. Ask some qualifying questions. Thoughtfully consider where the other person may be going with their remarks. Then come up with a well thought out response.
It will serve you well. :-\
Phonetic (slang) pronunciation of the Latin word for "Black". Historically, this word has served as the name for two countries in West Africa and a major river. The Latin spelling & pronunciation has changed as the term was adopted by Spanish, Portuguese and eventually English speakers.
Today it primarily serves as:
1) a trigger for immediate cries of "racism" and demands for monetary compensation
2) a symbol of elitism, as in, "My people and I are privileged and can use this term freely and without repercussion. Woe unto anyone outside our group who attempts to do so."
/s
If they want to censor “the N-word”, I’ll gladly agree if they include in that censored/penalized list 10 “F-bombs” and 100 “MF-bombs” for every deletion of the N-word.
Come now...it’s not about guilt or innocence, but about the seriousness of the charges...
as in...Yo..Yo..Yo... My Main “N Word”
astounding!
Yes I believe Ive heard a few athletes referring to one another as “My Main Nighardly...”
Come now...it’s not about guilt or innocence, but about the seriousness of the charges...
:-D
I get the feeling he may have noticed on my profile that I took a test and was categorized as “libertarian”. What’s funny about that is that I think the libertarian party is a fools mission. My real take is in my tag line. And that doesn’t even sum it up.
This may do it better:
http://www.sandmonkey.org/2012/05/07/the-lizard-parable/
How can any sentient being witness the last six years and see it as anything but an argument for less government?
It is a substitute for the C-Word.
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