Our bizarre obsession with words

An English depiction of an Irishman.

Sitting in my landlord's backyard in England the subject of oats came up. I mentioned that there is a reason the Irish and Scots eat oats.

With great disdain in his voice, he remarked, "Well, the Irish eat oats because they're stupid!"

Then he looked at me in panic. I could see that, for the first time since I had known him, he had suddenly connected my last name with my ancestry. He immediately began trying to suck the words back into his mouth: "Of course, I'm joking! I'm joking!"

I smiled sardonically, and gave a little shrug. "Looks like rain tomorrow, hey?" I asked. The conversation moved on.

And if I wanted to obsess over such trivia, I could probably fill a notebook with hundreds of other "micro-aggressions" against my background: "You're Irish, so you must love to drink, right?" Wait a second, in fact, every St. Patrick's Day, I could walk around New York and record thousands of "micro-aggressions": "Ah, you're celebrating my heritage by getting drunk until you puke into the gutter! I see."

But really, come on: we live in a world where people are beheaded for the ethnicity or religion, where they are slaughtered in concentration camps for their ancestry, where they are blown up because they practice a different version of their religion from the people who blew them up. My ancestors lived as a subject population in their own land: they faced severe discrimination in ownership and voting rights, and were starved to death in vast numbers. These things, my friends, are macro-aggressions, worth complaining about. You know what micro-aggressions are? They are the little shit we should overlook, so we can try to get along peacefully.

Comments

  1. I have to admit that, as someone who is Irish, "Mr. G-Orilla" is clever.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very true. It needed to be said. But I doubt the sincerity of the people complaining about the so colled micro-aggressions. It sounds more like a tool for personal benefit. Anti-racism is quite an industry now, and the end of racism would be a bad new for them.

    Have you followed the last round of regional elecction in France ? No less than the president of the National Assembly, the socialist Bartolone, accused his opponent who comes from Versailles, to be a defender "the white race", to make sure that our minorities would vote for him, as well as the sensitive leftists.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Gene, if you had knocked that wiseguy landlord out, I would buy you a Guinness.

    ReplyDelete

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