Theodore Roosevelt, the third Face on Mt. Rushmore, sits a lot further back than the other faces on the mountain. There is only 30 feet from the front of his face to the canyon behind the mountain carving, which gave the sculptor some moments of anxiety, should an accident occur while carving the face.
How carefully the carvers delineated the steel rimmed glasses of this monumental figure, who in life was repeatedly scorned for his poor vision, ridiculed by friends and family for his “personal weakness’. If he were alive today, how would he react to the admissions of many of us Americans to our weakness, and how we are confronted by others?
We’re fat.
Yup, we’re real porkers. Obese, plump, pigeon breasted, big hipped, bubble butted just shy of Jobba the Hutt F-A-T!
Oh, we worked at it, hard. In trying to eat right, we consumed mass quantities of pasta (the Mediterranean diet), chocolate (for the anti-oxidants) good carbs, and protein shakes that are as tasty as library paste.Now, we could model for Peter Paul Reubens, if it were only the 1600’s.
In the olden days (about 20 years ago) fat people were thought of as “jolly”. A woman said,”Odd, I don’t remember being funny when I weighed 127 lbs…I do remember being popular, but I thought it was my youth and long, blonde hair.”Now, she’s “jolly”, too.
That was in the days before “The Standard”: the “standard” by which we are all judged. Who does this “judging”? Is it some snotty prig, like on “American Idol”?. No, it’s THEM: the unseen, unknown ones who determine our life styles, looks manners and morals.
Not long ago, there was a letter to the editor of a small town college paper from a male student, bitterly denouncing the fat girls on campus. He inferred they should go somewhere else, maybe to another school, to end the eye pollution from their presence in his world.
It would make a great Robin Williams movie…”Fat Reservation…Where Murder is OK, but Fat Gets You Life Without Parole!” Robin could play a fat convict, with padding of course…he’s already funny. Kathy Bates could play the evil female fatty. Dressed in a burkah, she is as guilty as Charlie Manson of not living up to “The Standard”. The guards in charge would live in fear of catching “fat cooties” shed by the inmates. The dialog would be hilarious, and could result in a Standard –size Oscar.
Even First Lady Michelle Obama is buying into The Standard. She supports fighting childhood obesity, a worthy cause, to be sure. But when the teachers get out their lesson plans, and the phrase “Obese child” comes up, the offenders in every classroom will be singled out, stared down, pointed at and bullied with the merciless cruelty children are so skilled at…check out the child suicide statistics for verification. There they will stand, hit by the glaring light of Presidential disapproval.
A proposition: suppose “The Standard” be imposed on the Standard Bearers. Your weight and cholesterol levels are normal, fine, but, are you kind? You wear a size -0-, and the only food you ate was a lettuce leaf last Tuesday, great, but have you helped your fellow man on the road of life? NO??? Off to exile on the Island of Hate for you, bucky.
You are what you eat? Have a big glass of the Milk of Human Kindness.
From A Distance. A View From the Heads
Monday, October 25, 2010
Freedom of Speech
I thought of Thomas Jefferson, red headed, a gentleman farmer, and a
free thinker, and what he might have to say about free speech and...
Please take the Cacophony out to the Rutabaga
English is a funny language.
If you are a native born speaker, all of its little quirks, tricky grammar, and strange sounding word come second nature as we grew up with it: we heard it every day. Imagine, though, if you had to learn it as a second language, and learn it fast….total immersion, as if you were picked up by a helicopter and dropped into a village in, let’s say, Botswana.
This was the problem that faced the adult students I volunteered to teach English as a second language. I wondered what they thought…how they coped in Wal-Mart.
We are a nation of immigrants. The only “Natives” here bore names like Iroquois, Penobsctot, Lakota, or Hopi: strange, beautiful words. We immigrants brought along words from our own languages, odd words describing things in daily use. These words were used, repeated, spread around and eventually adopted by others as part of the language, words like “rodeo”, “lariat”, or “pita”.
OK, I’m and English Lit major, a fact that makes me lethal in some categories on “Jeopardy”. I read “Beowulf” (not, the movie, the original version from the 1400’s) in the original old English, which is a blend of Celtic, old German, rustic English and archaic French among others. You’ll need footnotes; lots of them, and an old English dictionary.
Take ‘glockenspiel”, a tower with a clock in it, and charming carved and painted figures like immense Hummels that come out of it and dance to a quaint German tune. There’s one in New Ulm, Minnesota, and one in Frankenmuth, Michigan (also the home of fabulous chicken dinners and a spectacular Christmas ornament store). Everybody in Michigan likely knows what a glockenspiel is, as do German speakers, but what of new immigrants, from, say, Viet Nam?
In English such words sound wonderful as they roll off the tongue, musical and rhythmic. A substitute teacher I had in high school, a college professor on sabbatical, told our English class the most beautiful words in the English language to her were….”cellar door.”
Ooooooohhhhhh-kaaayyyyy….!
I do love the sound of words, words like “akimbo”, “trans-mandibular”, “vestibule”, “cacophony”, “balderdash”,” farthingale”, codswallop”, or my personal favorite, “rutabaga”. Even the sound of these words, spoken aloud, adds excitement, interest, or at least perks up the ears. What????? What was that???
While these old words, driven by unfamiliar combination of syllables, can make people look up with quizzical expressions, there is a one syllable word that goes unnoticed these days…except by me.
In old English (not as far back as Chaucer, but back there a way), there was a word that meant to turn over a field to get it ready for planting, to add fertilizer and mix it in the soil. That word is FUCK.
So hideous that it was once bleeped by censors, banned from schools, churches, synagogues and mosques, its use in public would get you arrested .Today it exists as a whole grammar. Oh, don’t pretend you’ve never heard it, Sister Mary Immaculata!!!
F--- you: a verb
Let’s go f------ nuts!: an adverb
Who the f---?: a pronoun
Where the f--- is T-Dawg?: an article
There, apparently, for lack of a “better” word, goes the English language.
The next time you feel compelled to tell somebody “f--- you”! remember the root of the word is farming. Picture a rutabaga growing from their head…
free thinker, and what he might have to say about free speech and...
Please take the Cacophony out to the Rutabaga
English is a funny language.
If you are a native born speaker, all of its little quirks, tricky grammar, and strange sounding word come second nature as we grew up with it: we heard it every day. Imagine, though, if you had to learn it as a second language, and learn it fast….total immersion, as if you were picked up by a helicopter and dropped into a village in, let’s say, Botswana.
This was the problem that faced the adult students I volunteered to teach English as a second language. I wondered what they thought…how they coped in Wal-Mart.
We are a nation of immigrants. The only “Natives” here bore names like Iroquois, Penobsctot, Lakota, or Hopi: strange, beautiful words. We immigrants brought along words from our own languages, odd words describing things in daily use. These words were used, repeated, spread around and eventually adopted by others as part of the language, words like “rodeo”, “lariat”, or “pita”.
OK, I’m and English Lit major, a fact that makes me lethal in some categories on “Jeopardy”. I read “Beowulf” (not, the movie, the original version from the 1400’s) in the original old English, which is a blend of Celtic, old German, rustic English and archaic French among others. You’ll need footnotes; lots of them, and an old English dictionary.
Take ‘glockenspiel”, a tower with a clock in it, and charming carved and painted figures like immense Hummels that come out of it and dance to a quaint German tune. There’s one in New Ulm, Minnesota, and one in Frankenmuth, Michigan (also the home of fabulous chicken dinners and a spectacular Christmas ornament store). Everybody in Michigan likely knows what a glockenspiel is, as do German speakers, but what of new immigrants, from, say, Viet Nam?
In English such words sound wonderful as they roll off the tongue, musical and rhythmic. A substitute teacher I had in high school, a college professor on sabbatical, told our English class the most beautiful words in the English language to her were….”cellar door.”
Ooooooohhhhhh-kaaayyyyy….!
I do love the sound of words, words like “akimbo”, “trans-mandibular”, “vestibule”, “cacophony”, “balderdash”,” farthingale”, codswallop”, or my personal favorite, “rutabaga”. Even the sound of these words, spoken aloud, adds excitement, interest, or at least perks up the ears. What????? What was that???
While these old words, driven by unfamiliar combination of syllables, can make people look up with quizzical expressions, there is a one syllable word that goes unnoticed these days…except by me.
In old English (not as far back as Chaucer, but back there a way), there was a word that meant to turn over a field to get it ready for planting, to add fertilizer and mix it in the soil. That word is FUCK.
So hideous that it was once bleeped by censors, banned from schools, churches, synagogues and mosques, its use in public would get you arrested .Today it exists as a whole grammar. Oh, don’t pretend you’ve never heard it, Sister Mary Immaculata!!!
F--- you: a verb
Let’s go f------ nuts!: an adverb
Who the f---?: a pronoun
Where the f--- is T-Dawg?: an article
There, apparently, for lack of a “better” word, goes the English language.
The next time you feel compelled to tell somebody “f--- you”! remember the root of the word is farming. Picture a rutabaga growing from their head…
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