Dame Edna "forget Spanish"

[Clark, John]

Great reflection, Peter! I would add one thing:There surely is some kind of discursive or cosmic price to be paid when a social critic withdraws (in the sense of withdrawing from a bank account)  from the depths of unflective (and therefore often base and crude) beliefs and prejudices in order to "make a point." To put it in more narrative terms, a friend of mine used to occasionally make what he thought were humorous asides that were based on crude racist assumptions. He made these jokes--he said, and I understood--because he wanted to point out that such ugly beliefs were "out there" and, in the spirit of gallows humor would crack these awful jokes to somehow dispell the power that they had over him/us. After a while I asked him at point did he think that his crude, racist humor was no longer decrying racism, but actually keeping it going (among us two)? I used the analogy of a bank account, and I advised him that his account or license for making such remarks to me had ex!
pired, and that  I was no longer willing to be an audience for it. Another story: I once wrote a song with the word "nigger" in it, for the same sort of reason: to decry racism. Nowadays I cringe when I hear my home-recorded version of that song. Couldn't I have done better than to plunge the song into discursive debt like that? Evoking hatred is too easy, and it clearly charges a discursive price in that one breathes life into hateful words and tropes in order to decry them.

When I read Laura's forward, I felt I had to respond in some way. I ended up writing Vanity Fair and Dame Edna taking the prospective of the "leaf blower" or the "help." That is to say, why would any leaf blower want to bother to learn English in order to converse with a self-indulgent, self-centered  VF reader who faciley conflates notions of bellatristic literary output with human intelligence broadly conceived? What does the imagined VF reader (lampooned or otherwise) have to offer the "leaf blower" and "the help?" Judging from the attitudes of the blue collar Hispanics who are my friends, students (and my wife!), they do not need to be "blessed" by conversing with such folk. They'd much prefer the money they get doing honest work for their families.

John T. Clark
Department of English
California State University, Sacramento
jtclark at csuchico.edu



> ----------
> From: 	Patrick, Peter L
> Sent: 	Friday, February 7, 2003 2:51 AM
> To: 	Laura Miller; linganth at cc.rochester.edu
> Subject: 	RE: Dame Edna "forget Spanish"
>
> one response to this might be that the allegedly-comic
> character (I've never found Barry Humphries very funny,
> but that's neither here nor there) is simply spelling
> out what Hal Schiffman would call covert American language
> policy. Doing it through a fake-posh Australian cross-
> dresser's persona does cloud things up a bit, but one
> could hardly say he is very far off base. It seems in
> keeping with other things this character does which fall
> under the heading of "satire" -- a genre that is always
> intended to make a point, whether or not a funny one,
> but never intended to be taken literally.
>
> 	The question of what Vanity Fair intends readers
> to think by publishing it is another one -- I don't read
> the magazine so don't really know who their readership
> is supposed to be -- perhaps they *are* the sort of people
> who will miss the point of satire.
>
> 	Still I don't know what good it does to take satire
> as if it were literally intended, and object to that literal
> reading. It ignores the probability that there must be a
> subversive message there -- a message that is probably more
> or less in agreement with what the objectors believe.
> In other words, to say "Object to this because it is racist,
> classist and linguicist" etc. is to be oblivious to the fact
> that Humphries has already pointed that out indirectly.>
>
> 	It reminds me of cases when a reviewer misses the point
> of an analysis or passage, and "corrects" the author in review
> by giving their "own" analysis -- which is basically the same
> one, or indeed is derived directly from the one, that they missed
> or misunderstood in the work they're reviewing. (This recently
> happened to me as author, reviewed by a leading creolist who
> somehow managed to miss quite a few points I thought I had
> explicitly made, and it was quite infuriating-- but I doubt
> Humphries will be quite so thin-skinned as I am!)
>
> 	I suppose one could argue that identifying prejudice
> indirectly, without also directly condemning it, lays a humorist or
> other performer open to the claim that they share the prejudice
> they are making fun of, and might lead others to share it, or
> endorse readers' existing prejudices. This is a rather philistine
> argument, it seems to me, which assumes that making social and
> political prescriptions in a pedagogical manner is an artists'
> responsibility.
> 	We really have no idea whether anti-Spanish/anti-Hispanic
> prejudice is going to be increased by such satire or reduced--
> but we can predict that if enough people share the literal reading
> and object, the subject of ethnic-linguistic prejudice may be put
> off-limits for satire in the arena where it was published.
> 	Why that would be a useful thing escapes me...
>
> Peter L Patrick
> Dept of Language and Linguistics
> University of Essex
> patrickp at essex.ac.uk
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Laura Miller [mailto:lmille2 at wpo.it.luc.edu]
> > Sent: 06 February 2003 22:45
> > To: linganth at cc.rochester.edu
> > Subject: Dame Edna "forget Spanish"
> >
> >
> > This may be of interest to some.
> > Laura
> >
> > Original Message From Cesar Chavez Institute <cci at sfsu.edu>
> >
> >  If you haven`t seen the cover of this month`s Vanity Fair
> > magazine (Feb.  2003), you`ll be pleasantly surprised to see
> > Salma Heyek on the cover, but  that`s where the niceties end.
> > In an advice column entitled "Ask Dame Edna",  the author,
> > Ms. Dame his/herself, replies to a letter with some of the
> > most shameful racist remarks I`ve ever read in a magazine of
> > this caliber. We thought you might be interested in reading
> > what the Dame thinks of Latinos and what the editors and
> > Vanity Fair allowed to be published, so here you  go:
> >
> > "Dear Dame Edna,
> > I would very much like to learn a foreign language,
> > preferably French or Italian, but every time I mention this,
> > people tell me to learn Spanish George W. Bush speaks
> > Spanish." Could this be true? Are we all going to have to
> > speak Spanish?"
> > -Torn Romantic, Palm Beach
> >
> > "Dear Torn,
> > Forget Spanish. There`s nothing in that language worth
> > reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD of
> > Man of La Mancha will take care of that. There was a poet
> > named Garcia Lorca, but I`d leave him on the intellectual
> > back burner if I were you. As for everyone`s speaking it,
> > what twaddle! Who speaks it that you are really desperate to
> > talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German,
> > where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if
> > you`re American, try English."
> >
> > MiGente, we want you to use your power in numbers to tell
> > Vanity Fair what you think of this columnist and her/his
> > words. Send your letters to the editors at: vfmail at vf.com
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>