I have it on good authority that we now have 26 sets of personal pronouns available in English, including the gender-neutral zie, zim, zer, zis, zieself, and I expect there will be more to come since the spectrum of personal differences is endless. My wife, for example, who is adored by me, I can no longer think of as she or her, lumped in with other women, including harridans, hags, harpies and shrews, and so my wife is jen and jer and jenself, and several individuals whom I despise are scheiss and scheissen, and scheissenself. My fellow tall persons have the pronouns hi and hiya. Height is every bit as crucial an identifier as gender and so is intelligence. I don’t know any people I’d refer to as dem or dose, but surely dey’re out there somewhere.
Personal identity is a complex matter and if a pronoun is all you need to validate you, fine. It’d help if you pasted your pronoun on your forehead, but if you feel that would marginalise you or stereotype you, I understand. And now that the Supremes have made it a basic constitutional right to carry a concealed loaded weapon, I predict that we’re going to respect gender identity more than ever. A guy with a .45 under the jacket thereby becomes plural and they is going to be more numerous and you might want to become plural too.
“When I was a kid, I avoided playing football and instead I wrote poetry, which was considered weird in Anoka, Minnesota”
I am thinking of becoming unique myself and using geek and gink and gawk, but I don’t expect the plumber Mitch to respect this or my barber, Tommy, or Lindsay my dermatologist. Mainly it’s for my own benefit. When I was a kid, I avoided playing football and instead I wrote poetry, which was considered weird in Anoka, Minnesota, but there were other weird boys to hang out with and so we didn’t need a separate pronoun.
And now, with the Thompson-Cheney hearings, we are hearing about a president who considered Himself presidential even though the vote count showed otherwise, and He called up the fellow in Georgia who counted the votes and told him to find 11,000 more. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” He said. He ordered that voting machines be seized. He self-identified as a capitalised pronoun and was justifiably agitated when others, including men He had appointed, told Him otherwise.
Mr President did not wish to lose. Joe was a radical left-wing desperado who was missing some marbles, but more important, Mr President’s father, Fred, had instilled in his boy a powerful aversion to defeat and why should He take it lying down. And so you had that extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office in which Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer in the Justice Department, offered to declare the election fraudulent if he were appointed Attorney General. And Mr Rosen, the acting AG, and Mr Engel and Mr Donoghue sat across the executive desk from Himself and told Him that all the top people at DOJ would resign en masse if Mr Clark were made AG. And so the president backed down slightly, thus preserving the remaining integrity of the DOJ.
Mr Clark, who pursued this ploy and lost, was a Harvard grad who got his law degree at Georgetown and you wonder what the heads of dose institutions feel like. Probably like scheissenselves. They wish Mr Clark would take a long sabbatical in Samarkand, change his name to Janice and grow long hair and tie it up in a bun. Meanwhile, they are thinking about making ethics a required course.
Congressman McCarthy, who will likely become Speaker of the House in January, has urged his fellow Republicans to ignore the hearings and that is excellent advice. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. The phone calls from the White House to change the vote in various states, the rampage of Rudy, the 250 million raised by Him to fight a legal battle that was already over, the mob that busted into the Capitol while He watched on TV, Mr Clark’s tongue shining the president’s shoes – I admire people who can ignore this. It shows real willpower. I’m thinking of identifying as a Republican and using the pronouns We and Us. Democrats are a flock of flibbertigibbets and the Republican base is made of granite. Nothing can shake us. Nothing. Dynamite wouldn’t make a dent.
Originally published by garrisonkeillor.com and reprinted here with permission.
