Ponderings

My mistake might have been reading the news with my 13-year-old son. After all, Junior High is pretty ruthless.

“What’s the big deal?” was his nonchalant reply to the Jerry Lewis blooper. Maybe because of my glare, he offered an explanation. “I get called ‘fag’ hundreds of times a day.” My son went on to explain that the word ‘fag’ is used to delineate your place in the social pecking order. Specifically it means you’re pretty low on the Junior High food chain. Being defined as an indicator of social status, the word need not, he reasoned, be understood as an affront to the gay community. Maybe so.

As I watched him, I remembered a similar conversation several years ago when he was a little boy. He was napping on his father’s lap near our church booth at Pride fest. When he awoke and saw the “gay by god” sign on his dad’s shirt, he was outraged. “Take that off! You’re not gay,” he pleaded. My husband, chagrinned that I hadn’t properly prepared my son for this family outing, attempted to take the high road. “What do you think ‘gay’ means?” he asked. Without a moment’s hesitation my son spat, “‘Gay’ means you’re stupid! And you’re not stupid.” Turns out that my dyslexic son was often taunted on the playground with words like ‘gay’. In Elementary, he learned that ‘gay’ means stupid; now in Junior High, my son has learned that ‘fag’ means you don’t fit in.

Rather than diffusing my anger, his nonchalance was fuel on the fire. All the more I wanted Jerry Lewis to be above such trash talk. Certainly I appreciated the immediacy and sincerity of his apology, more I would have appreciated a vocabulary devoid of such insults.

I would like to think that celebrity’s know better. Surely his years in Hollywood have netted Jerry no small number of gay and lesbian friends. The speed of his apology certainly implies his knowledge of the depth of the offense. Tragically one’s own identity, one’s friends, and even one’s system of beliefs do not entirely define one’s vocabulary nor provide immunity from foot-in-mouth syndrome.

As adjectives for people, words like ‘fag’ have no good use in our vocabulary. They do, however, have active use in the school yard. And herein lies the dilemma. As another generation of children learn the word ‘fag’, the word becomes ever harder to unlearn. Once learned, words are nearly impossible to erase from our brains. We can relegate them, but never completely delete the offending words. Our children may know not to use certain words in polite company. Politically correct parents might even teach their children the cruel origins of offending words. Words like ‘fag’ and ‘gay’ may be filed in our brains under the title ‘insult’, but they are nonetheless a part of our vocabulary.

Vocabulary can be friend or foe. One of the tragedies of childhood vocabulary is the way that it creeps back into our lives without warning. No where is this more painful to watch than with our elders struggling with dementia. I’ve witnessed incredibly impassioned civil rights advocates with dementia make incredibly racist comments, using vocabulary that they had spent their adult life trying to unlearn. When we are tired, our defenses lowered, our minds hazy, the inappropriate crap that is stored up sometimes slips out.

In fairness it was a pretty exhausted Jerry Lewis that offended. Although my instinct may be to withdraw my support from Jerry Lewis and thereby the MDA, this latest episode of celebrity foot-in-mouth is not about Jerry or the MDA. This episode is a vivid reminder of the danger of the implicit curriculum of our culture and the importance of what is learned by osmosis on the school playground.

Rather than screaming at Jerry, we might better spend our energy cleaning up the playground.