The homophobic and misogynistic words of George Carlin

Recently, I was severely castigated in a Facebook comment thread for using the term "boob" in the humorous exchange that had formed underneath a meme, posted by a woman, using this picture:

My initial comment was, "teenage boy designs own bedroom." This received lots of laugh emojis, including from the original poster. Then some guy posted that I had left out lots of other demographics that would also enjoy the visual effect depicted. In my response, I explained that I wasn't trying to exclude any other "boob fanciers," but brevity won out over complete detail. The original poster of the image then chastised me harshly for using the word, "boob."

I hate to offend anyone inadvertently. If I'm going to offend someone, I want it to be a carefully calculated maneuver that I might very well regret for the rest of my life, but was at least done with my feet shoulder width apart and the slap or jab delivered precisely. So I brooded. I reflected on my entire history with the term "boob" for breasts. Breasts, by the way, was the acceptable term I was directed to, after I edited the offending comment to what I thought was a humorously overly elaborate descriptor of the anatomical detail at issue.

My awareness of the wider world began in the 1960s. As a younger sibling of the counterculture, I was old enough to feel like almost a part of it, but too young actually to be one. I was part of that generation's trickle-down dilution of culture into cosplay, as happens with any generation's trend setters who have to see their hair styles and clothing go mainstream and end up on school kids and toddlers.  I was a hopelessly unhip dipshit, but I tried hard, which only made it worse. It never got better.

My first guide into hipness was my cool cousin, who was the oldest child in her branch of the family. She knew the names of all the musicians who were calling out the failures of the establishment in poetry and song. She was a Wiccan and a pagan and dressed accordingly. She pierced my younger sister's ears old school, with a big needle, after numbing the earlobes with ice. It was a rite of passage that my sister endured with the bravery of any youngster on the verge of puberty, going through painful rituals to achieve another notch toward adult status. It wasn't old school then, it was common practice. She also guided me through my first purchase of blue jeans that weren't just little kid dungarees. And she tried to teach me, over the ensuing years, a few things about language and culture -- as she saw it -- regarding the mode average sexual relations between men and women. Among her stated preferences, she specifically stated that she thought that the word "breasts" was stuffy and stilted, that "tits" was unacceptably crude, and that "boobs" struck the perfect balance of informal and lighthearted.

In 1972, George Carlin presented the world with the list of seven words you can never say on television. They became a mantra. Shit, piss fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. For a conscientious Profanitarian, shit, piss, fuck, and motherfucker remain. But cocksucker can be considered both homophobic, and hypocritical as an insult, if one possesses a penis and accepts the ministrations of a fellationist. And of course cunt and tits are crude references to female anatomy. To some philosophers, no man should utter any reference to female anatomy whatsoever, unless it's part of their duly trained and educated profession. We can spiral off some other time into the question of whether any man should ever be allowed into a profession or trade that requires any reference to female anatomy. But even within the strictures of the first proposition, that no man shall speak of female anatomy unless licensed to do so, most of us are unlicensed to do so.

Working in a bike shop, I do get presented with anatomical details relating to the part of the body that endures contact with a bicycle seat. In that context I do have to hear and use terms describing the female intimate anatomy. Most of those questions can be answered with generic solutions related to saddle shape and position, without ever mentioning the human parts in contact with it. On rare occasions someone will go into graphic, specific detail. In that case I guess I am granted a limited term, temporary license. Even so, I can get by without speaking of the forbidden, only prescribing remedies using the inanimate bicycle saddle and its position in three dimensions.

When one is limited in speech by social strictures, one must rehearse mentally. Otherwise, when called upon to speak of the forbidden topics in a licensed, public setting, one may blurt something offensive, or lose so much time choosing words that one appears incompetent.

The problem is most challenging for the male, the white male in particular. As the dominant players in the rise of civilization, we've grown accustomed to setting the standards to which all others must adhere. This is hardly to say that we represent a true meritocracy. It's merely a testament to the power that bullies have in shaping group behavior over a wider and wider area. White men and their allies will admonish everyone else not to be thin-skinned ninnies when it comes to enduring taunts and slang that owe their origins to hierarchical interpretations that put the white guy on top. The groups under this regime have responded with increasingly rebellious humor through the decades, leading now to increasing insistence on recognition. White men and their allies are pushing back. That doesn't make them right. But it would be a mistake to make them all wrong, too. Beyond the whiteness, men in general possess undesirable tendencies that are the source of their strength and the root of their evil. We, the male, can generally be discounted, but you still want to be absolutely sure that a white, male achievement was stolen from someone of another hue or gender before pissing on it.

Day by day one learns what you can say to whom. As I have striven always to limit my offensiveness only to those who should be offended, I fight a tendency to play with language for humorous value, and to seek audience approval in the form of laughs or appreciative feedback. In a perfect future, people will all, voluntarily and without a dystopian legal framework, just dress in gray and walk past each other quietly. If we have business to conduct, we will conduct it. Sex work will be legalized as a therapeutic service engaged in without emotion or particular excitement. People's own homes might be filled with color and emotive activity, but it stays inside the enclave. Nothing will be forbidden. The underground world can be as bright and wild as one wishes. Go drinking. Go dancing. Go find some fun and have it. But the public face will be gray block buildings, gray clothes, emotionless commerce. The default of interaction will be as sterile as one can be. Any departure from that accepts the terms and conditions that go with any assumption of risk.

Kyle Rittenhouse has to defend himself

 Teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse has been on trial since the night that he shot three people, killing two. He has been praised or condemned, and subjected to media analysis for more than a year. At the end of his actual trial, just getting underway, he will be found guilty or innocent of the charges of murder and attempted murder. He will remain a polarizing figure in the historical record no matter how he fares in court.

Teenagers do ill-considered things. We consider the ones who get themselves killed as unlucky, but the ones whose rash decisions lead to the deaths of others face a lifelong challenge. Depending on how the deaths occurred, they might be harder or easier to rationalize. Accepting responsibility for a fatal error is always hard, but when the error was an active decision to use deadly force to end someone else's life the bar is at its highest.

True remorse is a life sentence without parole. It's one thing to get drunk with your buddies and crash your car, killing one or more of the passengers while you, the driver, survive. There was probably a certain degree of consent among the partying carload. It is easier to rationalize drunken teens playing with a gun than it is to accept that a sober and well-intentioned -- however misguided -- boy picked up a rifle and was willing to walk into a volatile scene of social unrest and make snap decisions in combat with people he identified as disposable.

Humans react to the threat of violence in two ways: fight or flight. These two reactions may mix in strange ways, as you see in videos of demonstrators clashing with either law enforcement or self-appointed keepers of the peace, in the posture of someone who tries to deliver a blow while simultaneously turning to retreat. You see it in street altercations and playground fights, the untrained actions of fear and anger. Adrenaline flows, the brain buzzes, the body tries to interpret the commands, and neither the fists nor the feet look heroic.

Carrying a weapon that extends your deadly capability many yards in front of you generates some degree of confidence. That confidence frays rapidly when an actual confrontation calls for clear decision making. Supposedly trained police officers have trouble making the right choice every time. Military personnel discover the difference between training and reality when they are actually attacked. Knowing how to handle a gun is not enough. You have to know how to handle yourself. Elite units are elite units not because of their weaponry, but because of their ability. As with so many other human endeavors, the ones who turn out to be excellent prove that we are not all created equal. We are equal in moral responsibility and in our right to be treated fairly, but not in the distribution of qualities that favor achievement in one realm or another.

Kyle went looking for trouble. He may have hoped that his armed presence would subdue the unhappy mob without the need to take any out, but he was equipped to kill, and he did so. Whether it was self defense in the actual instant, he didn't have to be there at all. He decided that he could help the beleaguered business owners of Kenosha by showing up armed at an already inflamed situation, to act more or less independently of any centralized command.

He meant well, within his world view. At least it appears that way. That makes it worse for him, because it makes him more vulnerable to himself, should he decide that he was completely unjustified from the outset. He must defend himself against the worst interpretation of his own actions. No one can protect him from that. He can decide to absorb the approval of his supporters and use that to block any notion that he did something really wrong. It may come easily. But if it fails, he will be left with his own inner voice reminding him every day that two people are dead because of choices he made. It will form a wall between him and deep happiness, unless he can write off the lives of his targets as just a lesson learned in youthful indiscretion. The compulsion to defend himself, even from himself, is powerful and normal. He has to live with himself.

Poor towns get stuck making bad deals

 The Effingham Zoning Board completed a long case this year in which an applicant asked for the necessary permissions to reinstate gasoline service at a convenience store that had removed its pumps and tanks six years ago, when new standards would have required them to replace their existing fuel facilities with new ones that met stricter standards for pollution control.

The mandate from the state, following on federal guidelines, skewed the requirement to favor larger corporations or wealthier store operators who could afford to front the cost to install the upgraded systems. Poorer stores could get a grant to quit the gasoline business completely and have all of the old fuel supply equipment removed at no cost to the store owners. There was no aid to upgrade the equipment. Go big on your own dime, or go away. The store here in Effingham opted to go away.

Without fuel sales, the convenience store relied on its deli and other retail offerings. The owners soon put the business up for sale.

The store is on the westbound side of Route 25. Within a quarter of a mile to the west, another, older store is located on the other side of the highway, convenient to eastbound traffic. The left turn into it from westbound Route 25 can be stressful at times when traffic is heavy. It's never as heavy here as it is in densely populated areas where truly heavy traffic is the norm, but it can get thick and fast enough to make the turn across its flow a bit tense, as one watches the rear view mirror for missiles coming up from behind as well. It was nice having an option on either side. And the older store is actually in Ossipee, so its tax revenue does nothing for Effingham.

The Ossipee valley is both blessed and cursed with the largest stratified drift aquifer in the state of New Hampshire. Stratified drift aquifers are the most productive reservoirs of ground water, but their water absorbing properties and the speed of its transmission through them make them especially vulnerable to pollution, such as the threat presented by buried tanks of the toxic chemicals on which our motor vehicles and transportation system rely.

The most vulnerable parts of the aquifer tend to be the flattest and most attractive to road construction and development. Back when people moved on foot or behind animals whose exhaust products were large and tangible but readily biodegradable, this coincidence did not present a problem. The more we came to rely on chemicals that we should really avoid drinking, and put more and more septic systems into that nice flat ground, the more bad things crept -- or poured -- into the aquifer when things went wrong.

When you know better, you do better, at least ideally. Certainly there's at least some public pressure not to poison people's wells, although concern diminishes with distance. As one native resident of the east side of Effingham remarked about a proposed race track on the west side of town back in the 1990s, "It wasn't near me, so I didn't care about it." But a little at a time we manage to increase people's awareness that problems have a way of creeping closer. You may never care about the people who live a mile away, let alone a longer distance, but maybe you'll figure out that your turn will come eventually, and you should figure out what your principles are.

Principles are not absolute. Idealists might have absolute principles, which is why they're useful as philosophers, but often disastrous in government. You have to lay the template of an ideal across the actual landscape of the place itself and the people who live there, and find a way forward that helps more than it hurts.

On the first application, for the Special Exception to have a gas station in town, the applicant appeared to have a decent case, since there had been a gas station on that site from 1997 to 2015, and it had not been discontinued due to any specific violation. It was only in site plan review at the Planning Board that someone noted that the convenience store and former gas station was located in the groundwater protection overlay district. The groundwater protection overlay district is based on the vulnerability of the aquifer presented by the particular soils mapped and defined in it. Until 2015 there were three gasoline stations on Route 25 between Route 16 and the Maine border. All of them are disastrously sited by the terms of the groundwater protection overlay district, and all of them were grandfathered, because they predated the ordinance by many years. Two of them upgraded their equipment by 2015 and continued to operate. They are also in other towns, not in Effingham. Thus they represent little value to Effingham's coffers.

The applicants had to return to the ZBA for a variance to allow them to put a prohibited use -- the gas station -- into the groundwater protection district. While the Special Exception had been pretty straightforward, the variance was not. It was gasoline versus drinking water. But it was also a functioning, tax-paying business that was reinstating a use that had already been there without incident for 18 years before it was discontinued. While there was some evidence of minor leakage in the soil samples taken when the tanks were removed, no one with a well nearby had reported pollution, and no evidence of it had appeared in surface streams that flow near the property. The new tanks would have to meet the standards that replacement tanks would have met in 2015, if the previous owners had put them in right away without delay. But gas stations are notorious sources of pollution, which was why they were prohibited in the district.

The deliberation was not an easy one. The resulting approval was not unanimous. But, as the dissenter, I fully understand the reasoning by which approval was granted. A variance has to meet five criteria to pass. It can't meet three out of five or four out of five. A majority of board members must agree that the application satisfies all five of these criteria. I felt that the application did not satisfy all criteria, but these decisions rely on interpretation. Specifically in this case, approval of the variance is not supposed to be contrary to the public interest,  but the choice was between the public interest of an improved economy and tax base versus the possibility of groundwater contamination. Were we better served to expand an existing business back to its original level of services, or to insist that anyone who wanted such a business had to find a site with acceptable soils? This would require the environmental disruption of a piece of undeveloped land, and I'm not sure such soils exist along Route 25 within Effingham. As for anywhere else in town, I'm hard pressed to think of any other town road on which you could put a convenience store and have it actually be convenient.

The only other through route is Route 153, which runs down the eastern edge of town so closely that it's actually in Maine for a short stretch. In South Effingham, one side of the road is New Hampshire and the other side of the road is Maine. There used to be a store in South Effingham, with gas pumps, but it was on the Maine side of the road. Ha ha! No tax revenue for you, Effingham, even though the family that lives all over that part of town lives on both sides of the road. It's one community in two states, living in bucolic tranquility untroubled by their respective state capitals. But when the tax bills come, the money divides like a watershed, flowing each toward a different town hall, eventually sending some to Augusta and some to Concord.

 The middle of Effingham is a compact mountain range about seven or eight miles west to east, and perhaps five miles south to north. Its highest peak is Green Mountain at the east end. The range tapers down over successively lower summits to Welch Top on the west end. The granite mass is separate from any other mountain system in the area, surrounded almost entirely by the glacial sediments of the Ossipee Aquifer. No roads cross it. The ones that used to cut into its flanks are not maintained all the way through.

The gas station on Route 25 represents the difficult bargains made by poor towns. If Green Mountain contained mineral resources that some corporation was willing to pay big money to extract, rest assured that it would be called Green Canyon by now. Remember also that the bigger the business, the more they will chisel for tax breaks. And the jobs they bring may be hazardous for workers who are inadequately compensated for that risk. The bulk of the profits generally go to executives and investors who don't even live in the town. Should a town do it? By some measures, absolutely not. What's lost is irreplaceable. But at some point you have to pay for basic services for the people who do live there. In the case of a state of the art gas station, the guarantee of harm is replaced by a gamble on the updated standards and on the operators' willingness, ability, and luck in maintaining a clean operation that will prosper sufficiently to make it a genuine asset.

What kind of businesses are appropriate on the aquifer that would actually be profitable and provide reliable tax revenue to the town? You could throw out a shingle for all kinds of cute and clean ideas, but will you make enough money to continue? Something grubby and mundane like a gas station serves everyone. Yes, we need to end the era of petroleum immediately, to save the environment on which all life depends, but so far we haven't, and the business model remains quite normal. If and when our species gets around to shutting down the industry, the end of the profits will be a problem for the investors who chose to hang on. This includes the gas station in question. Humans invented their way into this mess. Whoever survives will do their best to invent their way out.

Running even a small town takes more time and attention than just showing up once a week or once a month for a two-hour meeting. That's why town board positions tend to be filled by retired people or people whose work schedule allows them the flexibility to put time into training and research. You do get the self-serving scallywags who use their position for personal gain, like contractors on planning and zoning boards, and selectmen who steer contracts to their cronies. But you also get sincere individuals who are trying to do as good a job as they can for the ordinary people who trust them to find the balance.

We had a selectman for a while who was very active finding grants and other funding mechanisms to reduce the direct burden on local taxpayers, and who promoted the idea that anything we did spend money on should be built to last, so that we didn't have to spend more money on it soon afterward. But he annoyed some people who marshaled enough voters to vote him out by a slim margin, because fiscal efficiency is nice, but nobody likes a smartass. Thus do small towns shoot themselves in the foot over petty grievances. He also was pretty good at observing the conflicting effects and unintended consequences of town ordinances, and seeking a balance among competing wants and needs. He wasn't always right, but he asked good questions and facilitated discussion. He had served on a number of other town boards, including zoning, and returned to the ZBA as an alternate after he was no longer on the select board.

The approval of the gas station is probably going to be challenged in court. The denial would have been challenged by the opposite party. The conflicts are clear cut to their partisans. It will be interesting to see how the next level deals with it.