Category: US Politics (Page 2 of 2)

“This is a product of the systemic settler-colonialist imperialist cisheteropatriarchy, and we must engage all key stakeholders to build capacity among our organisers to create lasting, impactful change on Turtle Island.”

(Not a real quote, but it may as well be one.)

I hate sexism, racism, and colonialism too, but stop with the fucking jargon, for god’s sake. It just makes your valid points sound like abstruse academic talking points that everyday people won’t understand. They throw out these terms as though everybody self-evidently knows what they mean. (Turtle Island sounds beautiful and poetic… but nobody outside Indigenous or “””BIPOC””” [Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, an unnecessary acronym] activism knows what it means.)

No wonder idiots like Trump and DeSantis (or Boris Johnson, or any other right-wing “populist” rabble-rouser) get so much fucking traction. They’re full of shit, but they know how to talk like a regular person. Listening to some of this jargon makes my ears bleed, but I feel I have to put up with it because as a Multiply Marginalised Person™, I have to adopt the same bullshit rhetorical style that they all use. I push back against it as much as I can, but I can’t seem to get my colleagues to ditch the woke jargon (not to mention nonprofit and business jargon… if I hear the words “key stakeholders,” “capacity-building,” or “impactful” one more time…).

If you can’t make your valid points sound like anything other than academic waffle, then you are a bad rhetorician and need to learn how to share your ideas outside woke academia or organising circles.

There’s a movement afoot on the woke left to “cancel” the name America. This is asinine performative bullshit, just like land acknowledgments and #KyivNotKiev.

A lot of the objection comes from Latin Americans who do not live in the United States. The last I checked, the inhabitants of a country get to decide what they want to be called in their own language. In this country, people call themselves Americans. Mexicans and Bolivians can call us estadounidenses all they want. I don’t give a shit. But that doesn’t give them the right to dictate what people in this country call themselves in English.

Instead of “America,” the cancellers use “US,” “USian,” and other constructions. But they don’t have the same effect on the reader.

“US” sounds cold, sterile, like a government form. “America” conjures up images of apple pie, baseball, the Stars and Stripes, the valiant troops fighting the Nazis and the colonial British overlords. “Captain United States” wouldn’t have the same ring to it, would it? “Make the US Great Again” wouldn’t stand a chance as a political slogan. It’s too bureaucratic.

I can just imagine Trump making hay of it at one of his fascistic rallies: “Look, everyone. Many people are saying that the woke left is trying to cancel the word America, OK? They say, ‘Sir, they’re telling us not to say America, that it’s not politically correct.’ And I will say this, folks, they’re trying to cancel our entire country. Very sad. But with Trump, you’ll Make America Great Again.”

I’m not an American chauvinist or nationalist fanatic; in fact, I’m a fierce critic of American imperialism, especially in the name of “democracy promotion.” But that criticism can happen without this kind of performative bullshit (see a theme?).

Sad!