At ESPN, the answer — after consulting publicists and doing a cost-benefit analysis — is to publicly roll over show their bellies. Whereas me? I think that this is precisely how we surrender language to those who would presume to control us. And it’s something I’ve been warning about here for years: giving some motivated consensus the right to determine what it is you meant — which is quite different from allowing that you may not have expressed your intended meaning clearly, and that they therefore misunderstood, substituting their own signs for yours by way of re-signifying upon receipt the marks you used to express yourself — is a guarantor that the collective will use that power to molest the individual and command his conformity. In fact, that’s the very purpose of PC speech and the codes that attach to it.
Once you allow that what you mean is determined by how people claim to hear it, you’ve surrendered yourself to their whims. Which is why the Left has always been at pains to push the idea of “democratizing” language –really, to open your meaning (attached to your signs) up to re-imagining by some “interpretive community” while simultaneously holding you accountable for what they endeavor to do with your signifiers, having first determined that they are under no compulsion to treat those signifiers as the signs you created through your own intent.
In this way, they take ownership over you, a would-be authoritarian who demands his own intent to mean what he meant be given interpretative privilege — all the time pretending to some noble emancipation of language.
It’s yet another black day for freedom and individual liberty in this country. And I say that as a very white dude.
Sue me.
Similarly, one Luis Suarez (Uruguayan) placed a hand on the back of Patrice Evra’s (black, French) head during a football game in England. “Don’t touch me, you [expletive] South American” Evra says. “Porque, negrito?” asked Suarez.
Suarez received an eight match ban for “racially abusing” Evra.
I recall a local TV newscast back in the 1970s that began with headline teasers. The last two were something like, “Emperor Hirohito’s flight has left Japan as he embarks on his first visit to the United States and weatherman (whatever-his-name-was) says ‘There’s a nip in the air tonight…'”
link
This would be this ESPN. They’re a lost cause. I blame the Mouse.
There seems a strange consistency to certain “common” reactions to the overbroad interpretation of chink in this instance, and the view that X is the man. Both phenomena appear to me to emerge from a misunderstanding (or in a closer sense, imagining) of a potential public judgment of the interpreter (or, we might call him alternatively the X adherent), resulting in a self-estimation that places the weight on the interpreter’s interjection of extraneous matter into the speech acts of another, for the purpose of demonstrating said interpreter’s superior strengths (comparatively speaking). It’s as if the interpreter simply means to say (and some actually do say!): “Who would be fooled that this headline writer did not know and hence was not thinking of the slur, therefore intending the ambiguity? Well, I for one will not be thought a fool! Therefore, the headline writer must have thought both and intended both. And therefore the headline writer must be a sniggling racist.”
It’s kinda sad.
It’s something like a prior (infolding) re-creation of the interpreter’s seizure of intent, then applied to the interpreter’s own soul in his imagination, supposing the same will most certainly be done to himself in a manner he may now preempt through use of the same means: he believes he can cure the lie he fears to be made of himself (before it has been made) by committing a lie upon another, so to speak. It does have a nice circularity about it, though, we have to admit.
But I wonder whether this isn’t precisely what Machiavelli meant by “what is done”, as opposed to “what ought to be done”?
I suspect there is more at play here.
The first is that the major sport’s leagues OWN ESPN, hook, line and sinker. There are rider’s in their broadcast rights that prevent ESPN from denigrating their image–a definition they take to include anything that makes them seem less than fully tolerant of all possible fans (read: consumers)–and brand. Asia is mid nine figures to the NBA in fees and royalties, so a $90k a year editor (glorified headline writer) is a fart in the wind next to that cash stream.
As a reporter, the MSM reputation of ESPN is of a poorly run frat house. Literally, people party like its 1999: Drinking like a rock tour circa 1976 and screwing in offices is de riguer. They HATE when it gets talked about, so like good liberals, they overcompensate. Your intern just got knocked up and had an abortion?
Totally dealable.
You told a “Priest, Rabbi and a Minister walk into a bar…” joke at a fund-raiser?
OH-MY-GOD!!!!!
I’m not disagreeing with Jeff, but there are two other layers here.
Sometimes Roddy, it looks like more is less.
Ah. More “false theology” then.
I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Chink in the armor? Meh. If you’re going to invest all of your time reading bad faith into stupid headlines, I’d say you should buy yourself a good dictionary and a copy of “A Hog on Ice” to get the feel of where a lot of expressions come from.
It reminds me of the fellow who got fired for using the word “niggardly” in a staff meeting years ago. If your vocabulary only includes swear words, it’s no one’s fault other than your own for being stupid and misinterpreting a perfectly accurate word for a pejorative.
Roddy —
Yeah, that’s what I meant by cost-benefit analysis.
But it’s worrisome more for the legitimacy it grants to the ostensible reasons behind the firings and suspensions. Businesses are always taking this route, not realizing that what they are saving in the short term by not fighting they are losing in the long term, both in terms of freedom and in terms of the frequency of such events they’ll wind up having to deal with.
Thank god nobody said boy, or used a spade, or was being spied on by a spook, or is so fat that they were tempted to talk about their many chins, etc.
Now, geoffb? Ok, now.
Dear ESPN,
Stop leading with your chin!
‘K?
I have noticed that no one in the MSM has remarked on the anit-semetism of the OWS movement—worldwide. Zombie has documented a lot of it, but you won’t see it on teevee.
I guess Jews are still handy whipping boys.
Jeff,
Point taken. Totally correct.
Leigh,
Agreed. Zombie did a series of photo blogs on gay rights/pride festivals that the OLD LGF linked to religiously. It was beyond NSFW but was deeply, deeply disturbing about a segment of the gay populace and how they show pride. I mean, I would have “bathhouse culture” was dead. It’s quite alive and well.
I think Zombie is a woman, or guess it, but he/she also did some devastating photo stuff on who shows up at those left wing rallies.
This kills me. Normally I am right on the anti-PC bandwagon.
But in this case, the idea that a “headline writer” at ESPN wrote “Chink in the armor” about Jeremy Lin and it WASN’T supposed to be a joke – is ludicrous.
Furthermore, unless you KNOW that he didn’t then you are doing nothing more than guessing. And for that, ESPN must be attacked ? Please.
Roddy,
Zombie is a woman. I read through that photo series you’re referring to, and even though I lived in San Francisco back in the the 80s, I was shocked. The worst part of it, to me at least, was that there were small children there while these guys were getting their freak on.
She has also documented a number of pro-Pali rallies that show people in whatever those headscarves are called that Yassir Arafat used to wear (mostly white students, btw) carrying signs that call for the destruction of Israel, burning Israeli flags, et al. Pretty ugly stuff.
Zombie still has a site at zombietime.org or com, I can’t remember which.
sdferr,
Formatting is also crucial to humor it seems.
heh, too true