WeAculpa

WeAculpa: Corrections and Apologies

            Rocket City Blues has been hit with surprisingly heated, even enraged, and possibly threatening requests for apologies, corrections, and retractions following July 11’s post, The House of Representatives To Do Self-Examination. It’s no excuse but maybe an explanation to say that two of our staff are adjusting their meds, which might account for some problems of punctuation, spelling, misquoting, and managing tone. But more important, we think that

some of you people need to calm down. Just calm down, would you?

CALM.THE.FUCK.DOWN!

O.K. now. We are doing our best. And everything is not our fault.  We will take this pile of stuff one by one. Just please stay calm.

(1) The staff of Rep. Spender Bowcuss writes that the speech we referred to in our last post was not in fact about federal subsidies for kudzu but rather for okra. We apologize. Also, the congressman’s staff point out that it is “not very nice to make fun of peoples (sic) names since they din’t (sic) have no (sic) choice in the matter when they were just bornt “(sic). We agree. Rep. Buttkiss is probably a very nice man, and, as we know, there is always a little Baccus in each of us, though not so much Spenser unless you are an English major. Lots of people in our region, especially politicians, are named for the eminent writers and literary characters of the past. There’s Homer Barron. There’s Artur (sic) Davis. There’s Byron Scrugg. And Shakespeare Shitstake, of the famous Opalika Shitstakes. Respect.

(2) The staff of Sen. Dick Shelby seemed to be irked about a point of feasibility, claiming that “a snorkel can’t be used that way.” We disagree.

(3) One reader up in Tony, Alabama and seventeen in Cullman claim that the illustrative image at the fore of the feature proves that we are “big city Leftists because the funger (sic) is pointing to the Left.” Well, in respect to the finger, we had something else in mind.

Several complaints addressed the “DISCLAIMERS” section of the feature, to which we may say that sequence is almost entirely corporate boilerplate for which we bear no responsibility whatsoever. To be sure, there might be something objectionable in the line, “Maybe your health care provider is a dick,” so we’ll address that and another thing that is not our fault.

(1)         The line at hand or rather, more specifically, the term in hand could be in some sense read as sexist, since your doctor could be a girl doctor. In fact, my doctor is a girl doctor, and she is terrific, a saint. And probably the vast majority of primary care health providers are women, since the boy doctors are all going for the big bucks in heart surgery and oncology where the dying people are old and have some money. Probably too most of us would not be calling a girl health care provider or for that matter any female professional a dick. Maybe Ayn Rand, or Margaret Thatcher, or Leni Riefenstahl, but mostly no.

Well, back to the point. After a little reflection our readers may be sympathetic with our editorial practice as regards the somewhat bad word at hand. In our opinion, the “bad” in the semi bad word is contextual. After all, Dick Clark? No problem. Dick and Jane? Everybody there is terrific, and Puff too. Dick Cavett? Smart though maybe Smartypants. Spotted Dick, the canned English comfort food? Pretty funny, but they are British and they like it.  Moby Dick? A very big, big one.  And finally we come to Dick Cheney.  Certainly not as big as Moby Dick. In fact, kind of withered and crooked.  After he flunked out of Yale in his first semester and putzed around in Wyoming for a while, Dick Cheney slipped into Washington and served another Dick, Dick Nixon, famous for saying right on TV “I am not a Dick.”  Having learned the practice in the highest places, so to speak, Dick Cheney went on again, this time to slip into the Halliburton company, famously engaged in global dickery, including a certain fail-safe device on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

But to return to my point again, if some of our readers want us to be entirely non-sexist in our remark about your health care provider possibly being a dick, we would have to use for balance with “a dick” the other word, the bad word. Which is perplexing, in a way, since referring to someone as a “dick” will generally not get you thrown out or even mildly disliked. In fact, people will usually think it’s funny. But the other word is bad. Now, in Britain, especially in Scotland, if you are in a pub and there are a bunch of guys getting hammered after a soccer game, you will be sure to hear at least one of them call another that bad word. But they don’t always seem contemptuous or mean when they use the bad word, and if they are not already good-naturedly punching the daylights out of each other, they seem to like being called that. The bad word. We at Rocket City Blues are uneasy with the bad word, but we have nothing at all against its signified. In fact Mother Nature made us very happy with that, the signified and the referent and the whatever. It’s all good. Think about it. We do a lot. However, we’re not using the word. No way.

(2)         Finally, as also regards the Disclaimers section of the last post, several readers complain that if you are dead, you cannot telephone a law firm, and that is true.

This is language. This is how everything works.