“Retard.”
The very surprising thing about Petri Town is that, for all its gigantism, it’s really a bunch of small towns, swipes of a cultural swab onto agar that have grown into interesting strains of people — the inbound outcasts, the affectedly homegrown, the very tall women and the camera-ready families and the drug-addled and the drivers of food trucks and the men who are very tall women. And in my experience, and this is curious for a big town, people seem essentially good.
I have been sensitive to this kind of thing, especially as regards my brother, henceforth referred to as The Boy. His outbursts and carrying on throughout the years have drawn some curious looks, but in general, people have been kind and, to the degree they’re able, understanding. As it happens, I’m the shit. I’m the one who pounced on him over the years and wrestled and generally behaved as a big brother, which maybe wasn’t always what was called for. O how our mother suffered!
(I make it up to him when I’m home by driving him around. He enjoys the drives. He disappears into the rhythm of the yellow lines and the staccato chatter of passing trees and cars in a way that is easily deeper, more meditative, than any of the proffered pasttimes thus far encountered in Petri Town. Watching surfing on the flatscreen at a downtown bar — that comes close. With the buffalo wings.)
But so I take very personally everybody’s fave 21st-century slur. No, not “douchebag.” That’s a passing fancy. No. “Retard.” Or as a Special Olympics campaign has so dubbed it, the r-word. One of my special secret joys is to draw people into telling jokes that involve The Boy’s ilk. I’ll encourage the jokes, laugh heartily along, request another, guffaw at the salient moments of bumbling latter-day Uncle Tomism, and then begin my own joke:
“Well let me think. Hmm. Okay. There’s a young mother who has a child who doesn’t speak and doesn’t learn and when he’s finally diagnosed, she asks the doctor, knowing nothing about the syndrome, if he’s going to die… Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”
Like I say, I’m a shit.
I worry about these things, I do, because unlike racial stereotypes or gender or sexuality jokes, there are people who don’t form lobbies, who don’t start fights. So it falls to the individual to get decent. Our society can only be judged by its treatment of its weakest, right? The meek and all.
So while I approach the thing rather in the manner of psychological torture, a sort of waterboarding, some people are more noble about it. I found a video of a kid named Soeren Palumbo giving a speech to his high school, and it feels like a Movement rather than a punchline.
It’s good and decent stuff. It’s not cynical, which is why it feels weird to like it. I’m glad that I haven’t come too far down this other path that I forget how to appreciate it; I’m glad that I still find people essentially good. I’m glad I want to be like him.
Oct 5th, 2009 9:46pm
