Take a Laxative, Will

 

Take a Laxative, Will

...And the Award for 'Most Awkward Moment in a Musical, Comedy or Variety Show' Goes to...

©2022 Ross Williams

I don't mind saying, I'm torn. I'd say I'm tearing my hair out, but it's not that big a deal, and besides... too soon.

On the one hand, I don't like Chris Rock. He's a decent actor, but he's an entitled, racist asshole who – frankly – deserves far more than a slap across the face. He claims to be a comic, but I don't agree.

On the other, I do like Will Smith for most everything except his rap, which is doggerel set to a juvenile rhythm. He's an excellent actor, as his new Oscar for Best ditto attests, and from all accounts has a stable [if unconventional] marriage, which is scarce in Hollywood.

In case you missed it as I did, and there are certainly many who will have, Chris Rock made a joke about Will Smith's wife during the Oscar Awards show and Will took serious exception to it. The result was the ...well, the slap heard 'round the auditorium. I was about to type “'round the world”, but no one watches these things anymore because most people are thoroughly disgusted by the political horseshit that has become synonymous with Hollywood and its self-righteous “woke” assholery. Especially during their awards shows.

At any rate, I'm torn.

I'd really, really like to be on the Fresh Prince's side here, and pull a Nelson Muntz on Chris Rock. But I can't.

Chris Rock made a joke about Will Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who has alopecia. The joke was about Jada starring in the sequel to G.I. Jane, the movie where Demi Moore shaved her head. You can claim the joke was tasteless if you like. It might very well have been. As someone who's losing his own hair, I can sympathize. But I'm a man, and hair loss is part of the male privilege we men all profit by. It's got to be orders of magnitude more distressing for a woman to be going bald, particularly one as attractive as Jada.

And I can sympathize with Will about it, too. I've had people insult my wife in front of me thinking they were being funny, and I've had to defend her honor. “Your wife married YOU?? How gullible is she?”

At any rate, Hollywood insiders, the leftist, liberal, “progressive” elite, have been on a thirty-year program to eradicate “insensitive” japes from the world of comedy. Daniel Tosh famously made rape jokes a decade ago and the Hollywood comedy world circled their wagons against him. “You can't do that!! It's too uncomfortable to women!!” Aww, poor baby.

Apart from rape jokes, Hillary Clinton's haberdashery has been declared off-limits by the super-sensitive left. You can't say “Yo! Medusa! The 90s called and they want their pantsuits back!” Eighty percent of The View, once they recovered from their apoplexy, would have you a trending twit on Twitter if you did.

Also included in comedy's forbidden list is homosexuality, transsexualism and the grooming that goes with it, dwarfism, obesity, ugliness, physical deformities and handicaps all around, mental handicaps of all kinds even when the person serving as the butt of the joke is not strictly mentally handicapped, death, disease, racial distinctions, ethnic distinctions, religious distinctions, gender distinctions, political distinctions, geographical distinctions, social distinctions, economic distinctions, socialist hypocrisies, democrat governors murdering oldsters by putting ill patients in uninfected nursing homes…

...unless the one being roasted is a white, male, WASP, christian, middle-class or greater, and not indisputably leftist.

Why wouldn't involuntary female baldness be included in the list of topics too crude to use for humor? Will Smith would seem to have come to the obvious conclusion that it should have been, and that Chris Rock was way, way out of line. Again. Like he has been countless other times on countless other topics.

Chris Rock deserves what he got. Just not for what he said at the Oscars. So, what the hell:

“Ha ha!”

-Nelson Muntz

Mark your calendars. March 27 2022 may just be the date that the leftist freaks, in Hollywood and otherwise, realize that no topic is verboten to comedy, and that they need to regrow their sense of humor. At the very least, us white, male, WASPy, middle-class non-socialists can go public with our jokes about the left's collective constipation.

Casualties of Another's War

 

Casualties of Another's War
©2022 Ross Williams

Inarticulation is one thing. Most people have words that simply will not form properly in their mouths and refuse to come out sounding like human speech. I, myself, cannot say wildly ...or mildly, or childlike, or anything that contains that middle combination of letters. I either strangle the Ls, or have to completely skip over the D.

Deliberate mispronunciation for dig me, aren't I cool reasons is another. The mispronunciation of Caribbean as cuh-RIB-ee-un emerged out of nowhere in the 1930s among America's nouveau riche profiting from the Great Depression. They were as much as declaring, “Old money pronounced it Care-uh-BEE-un and look at them begging dimes on street corners; this just proves it's cuh-RIB-ee-un.” And by this time, morons who have no concept of linguistic history and too ignorant to dig into it are copying them, because apery is fine. The word is pronounced Care-uh-BEE-un. Learn it, live it, get used to it.

Deliberate mispronunciation for politics, though, is infantile. It's unforgivable and is one form of that common American practice that manifests itself most popularly among our “progressives” [ironic term], but which is shared by all domestic political persuasions and most people who subscribe to those politics. It is the sanctimonious practice of “cancellation”. If you do something that is seen by a “progressive” as so thoroughly outside the pale of the he/him, she/her, they/them/it political sensibilities, you will find yourself being “canceled”. This entails all “sensitive” people and institutions ignoring you, refusing to allow you to, essentially, join in the reindeer games. Because Rudolph was the bad guy for being the square peg, obviously.

With that in mind, Russia recently invaded Ukraine, and even America's liberal cum “progressive” cum socialist crowd has – ironically – largely found this to be distasteful. To that end, restaurants have discontinued the Russian dressing, which is mayo, ketchup and dill relish, at the salad bar. Some are substituting a “Ukrainian” dressing, which greatly differs in that it is ketchup first, mayo second and dill relish. It has all the telltale earmarks of the “freedom fries” that replaced the french ditto at several burger joints during the Gulf War. Pointless pouting for the purpose of signaling a vacant virtue.

Not to be outdone in the down with everything Russian department, America's media stylists have declared that the worldwide pronunciation of Ukraine's capital is no longer acceptable. For roughly ever, Ukraine's capital – Kiev – has been pronounced “kee-EHV” in America. Two syllables, accent on the second. Ukrainians had been a subject people under Russian dominance for several centuries, and Ukraine merely a province under whatever Russia had in the way of government, tsarist or communist. In the Russian alphabet, Ukraine's capital is spelled Киев. The American, indeed the entire English-speaking worlds', spelling has been a roman alphabetic transliteration of the Russian cyrillic alphabetic spelling: Kiev. Not a big deal, right?

Yes, big deal, to Americans who are primarily interested in style over substance, itching to cancel, cancel, cancel. ...which includes, sadly, most Americans today. As a consequence, American media, after dicking around with “kuh-VIV”, “kie-uhv” and a handful of other slab-tongue options voiced near the end of February in the early days of the Russian invasion, invented “keev” as the Not-Russian alternative to let the world know they didn't agree with Putin's little invasion. And, sadly and pathetically, most Americans are accepting it without a quibble. “It's how the Ukrainians pronounce it...”

Just one problem. It's not.

Ukrainians have a language separate and distinct from Russian, in most respects in the same way that Americans have a language separate and distinct from the English. Which is to say, not very. What they do do differently is pronounce; they have different accents. But again: not by much. There's more differentiation in the pronunciation of English words between Brooklyn and Dallas than there is in the shared Russo-Ukrainian words between Volgograd and Odessa. What they really do differently is spell.

While both languages' alphabets are derived of the Greek alphabet Saint Cyril took north with him in the 9^th century to convert and educate the pre-literate pagan Slavs, Ukraine has a different version of the cyrillic alphabet than the Russians have. This makes the distinction between the Russian language and the Ukrainian language more like the distinction between Señor Spanish and Signore Italian. Both use the roman alphabet, but the Spanish added the double-L and the “enya” to accommodate their specific idiolect. Still, a Spaniard and an Italian can easily converse, each in their own tongue, with relatively few stoppages in play. Likewise, so can a Russian and Ukrainian.

The Ukrainian spelling of their capital city is Київ. It is, in the Ukrainian diction, a two-syllable utterance, not a single syllable as American media morons would reduce it. The nearest it comes to being spelled – and pronounced – in the English alphabet and language is “Kyiv”, or “KEE-uhv”.

Give a very close listen to the Ukrainian and Russian versions of Kiev, Kyiv, Киев or Київ. What you will hear is that of the two pronunciations, the Ukrainian pronunciation [KEE-uhv] is virtually identical in sound to the traditional American pronunciation [kee-EHV], and the primary distinction is in the syllabic stress.

Once again for the slow kids in class: Ukrainians pronounce it KEE-uhv. Americans have always said kee-EHV.

On the other hand, the Russian pronunciation – unless you listen very very very closely – sounds almost identical to the “keev” currently being illiterately spewed by media's every babbling head on radio and television news.

Киев? Київ?

KEE-v? KEE-uhv?

Kiev?

Kee-EHV?

To ears untrained, inattentive, or [like mine] simply old and worn out, the distinction among any of them is either unnoticeable or altogether absent. What is noticeable is the grotesquely illiterate and preening posturing of “keev”, done – declaratively if not wildly inappropriately – to inform Ukrainians, through subtle linguistic tics, that we side with them and not the Russians. Call me a pain-in-the-ass pragmatist, but I'd think a boatload of javelin missiles would make that statement far more meaningfully. Want to make sure they understand? Send another full of stingers.

“Oh, but it's a way to show respect for the Ukrainians and their separate 'identity'.”

I get the inferiority complex suffered by the collective psyche of a people who'd been subjected to slavish treatment by their Slavic conquerors, as the Ukrainians have. Stalin's pogrom upon Ukraine eclipsed even Hitler's upon the Jews. Hell, even Americans who'd merely been subjected to English taxes against their will, in the decades after the Revolutionary War, went out of their way to divorce and divest themselves from 'English' anything.

Finance, n. The art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager. The pronunciation of this word with the i long and the accent on the first syllable is one of America's most precious discoveries and possessions.

-Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil's Dictionary”

But it's all transitory window dressing that doesn't mean a single god damn in the long run. Three generations later the English and Americans were back to being cozy cousins, and in a few generations, Ukraine and Russia will undoubtedly be as well. Putin can't live forever, and the way he's treating his inner circle, the chances of him surviving to the end of the year are increasingly dim.

Go ahead and change the American roman alphabet spelling to more closely mimic the Ukrainians' cyrillic alphabet if you absolutely must; I shall not. But if you can't think of anything more substantive to demonstrate your support for Ukrainian sovereignty than the way you pronounce their capital, then use their actual pronunciation: KEE-uhv. Exaggerate the way Ukrainians pronounce it and make it two words, if you insist: “Key Yiv”. But “keev” simply adds your intellectually integrity to the growing list of casualties of their war. If anything needs to be canceled, it is the loss of intellectual integrity.