Recently, Sarah Palin feigned outrage at the fact that Rahm Emmanuel called the people that elected his boss into office “fucking retards”. Naturally, neither she or anyone else objected to the insult to people who were only asking that Obama fulfill his promises; rather, her faux anger was voiced on behalf of the mentally retarded, such as the prop little boy that she carries with her everywhere.
This morning, my Pandora Bob Dylan radio station, served up Idiot Wind.
What do these two disparate events have to do with one another? Well, the second got me thinking (an achievement in itself) about the first, and about the malleability of language. Dylan’s song, after all, is about many things, but it certainly isn’t about the mentally retarded.
Nowadays we cheerfully use the term idiot as an insult, without a twinge of conscience, even though its original meaning (now demoted to second place behind “a foolish or stupid person”) is as follows:
A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive.
The term “moron” has a similar derivation, though it was applied to the less profoundly retarded. Had Rahm used either of those terms, and I’m sure he would have, given half the chance, it’s highly unlikely that it would have occurred to Sarah to take offense (being an idiot herself, she is surely unaware of the derivation) nor would anyone else. The folks at MoveOn would have had to lick their wounds in silence. These terms have, so to speak, been euphemized. The euphemism for these now quite egalitarian terms of abuse is, of course “mentally retarded”, which is now rapidly acquiring all the negative connotations (at least with respect to the class of people to whom it refers) that “moron” and “idiot” have now almost shed. Yes, the term “mentally retarded” is itself in the process of becoming euphemized. The term now is “special” or “challenged”.
But we live in a fast paced world. While it took centuries to even perceive the need for euphemisms for “idiot” and “moron”, it took only decades for the same process to require a replacement for “mentally retarded” and, unless I miss my guess, it will be far less time than that before we are seeking replacements for “special”, “challenged”, or whatever other term wins the prize. I blame the kids. You can’t fool them, and they have a boundless capacity for cruelty. Even as we speak, there are kids on the playground referring to their peers as “special” or “challenged” and, need I say it, not in a good way.
It may seem unlikely that the term “special”, for instance, could ever acquire overwhelmingly negative connotations, but stranger things have happened. I can remember when a person could say that he or she was “gay”, meaning “happy”. That meaning lives on in our dictionaries (banished to second place, like “idiot”), but lives there a person under 90 who would now use the word in that way?
Meanwhile, let us pause for a moment of silence for the fucking retards against whom Rahm directed his anger. They made the mistake, over and over, of being right on the issues and right about the politics. There is nothing that will earn universal scorn more quickly than being consistently right. Who would dare come to the defense of someone who has committed such an iniquitous act? You’d have to be an idiot.