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Valieva's Final Olympic Performance: Another Possibility

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Maybe Valieva got tired of being a pawn of the Russian system and did the best she could do, but in a surprising way.

Maybe she threw the race.

First the Russians put her through the ice skating mill, including a very clever and complex doping regimen. Then they forced her to skate under the pall of the usual Olympic dithering and indecision.  Finally, confident that the Olympic authorities would, eventually and as usual, bow to Russia, Valieva's handlers expected their star skater to dazzle in the finals.

But Valieva had other ideas.  She didn’t crack.  She took responsibility and she did the admirable thing, faking a sloppiness that began with the clumsy quad.  And so the gold went to a skater who was tainted only by association with a rotton system.   

Yes, Russians received both gold and silver medals, but the 2022 prizes will never have the sheen of medals won under more savory conditions.

And speaking of nastiness, isn't it possible that the coach who scolded Valieva as she left the ice wasn’t berating her for failing the system, but for rebelling against it and doing the ethical thing?  This explains the peculir optics, the lack of warm words and consoling hugs.  Both Valieva  and her handlers knew what had really happened.  And so, once the torture of waiting for the score was over, Valieva ran off, in tears and essentially alone.

This being the case, I wish her well, although her prospects in Putin's Russia look less than promising.  

And my sympathies to all the fine skaters forced to perfrom in a farce.

 

Repeat after Me: Oprah is Not Qualified

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Understandably, perhaps, Oprah Winfrey has basked in the adulation prompted by her remarks at the Golden Globes awards ceremony. Now it’s time for her to put a stop—a totally unambiguous stop—to the nonsense. She is not—repeat NOT—qualified to be president of the United States of America.

Democrats may be looking for a political messiah, but it was pretty shocking to see House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi waffling instead of declaring, “Much as I love Oprah, I’m not jumping on a Winfrey bandwagon.” Was this an attack of courtesy? Or opportunism? Or a bald admission that the Democrats as a political party are totally bankrupt? As in, no vision; no agenda; no credible up-and-coming leaders.

Yes, millions of fans would vote for Oprah—and it seems almost sacrilegious to criticize her, but leading a complex country in a complex world isn’t for amateurs, however good-hearted their well-rehearsed public personas may be. And lest anyone tries to knock a hole in this argument, I hasten to mention Ronald Reagan, who was indeed an actor by profession. Before his presidential run, however, he’d been Governor of California, a state with a diverse population and an economy larger than that of most countries. For all his ideological deficiencies, he knew from the day he was inaugurated that a president's powers are limited —and, yes, he negotiated skillfully with Mikhail Gorbachev when the Soviet state was tottering. Unfortunately, his catchy little mantra proclaiming that “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” has undermined the ability of subsequent presidents to govern effectively.

Which brings us back to Oprah Winfrey who has no more experience in politics and governance than the disastrous Donald Trump. None. Zilch. Nada. Learning on the job? Growing on the job? Possible. But far from ideal. Americans deserve a president who understands the job from day one.

None of which is to say that Oprah Winfrey hasn’t had an remarkable career. She was, of course, a highly praised actress. More importantly, as a TV personality, she touched people’s hearts even as she promoted books in a country which seems to have a congenital aversion to reading, let alone thinking. She has also been a fairly successful businesswoman. All without a hint of scandal, so far as I know. But the world is full of wonderful people who lack the experience and knowledge it takes to guide a major country in the twenty-first century. Oprah herself should know this, but show business has a terrible reputation for inflating egos.

If Ms. Winfrey has decided she’d like to try her hand at politics, let her do it the responsible way. Let her run for Congress. Let her follow up with a stint in the Senate. And then, having earned her spurs, let her go for broke. Millions may like her on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready for the presidency.

To Touch or Not to Touch

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I touched a man last week. A strange young man, no less. He’d asked a good question after a lecture.   I delivered my compliment while laying my hand on a jacketed shoulder, after which I went into apology mode: “Sorry,"  I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I don’t mind,” he said, “but I can’t do it to you.”

My response? “Yes, you can.”  When I’ve done a great job, definitely give me a pat on the shoulder.  Or even a (not too hard) slap on the back.

And when mixed-gender teammates or committee members celebrate an unexpected victory, let them link arms in solidarity! What’s more natural?  Go, team!  Let them do a little cancan, too.

But, all you scumbags at a social event, don’t insinuate your arm around my waist or play kneesies under the table or stare pop-eyed at my chest when I’m trying to talk to you, although I usually minimize the latter by minimizing cleavage, the result of an amusing experiment I devised a few years ago. I baited the hook with a yumyum plunging neckline. Suddenly guys who’d ignored me before were buying me drinks. It was a hoot! It was also very boring.

Wolf whistles never frightened or flattered me, and it didn’t take me long to understand that the merest hint of a loutish ogle is nothing but diminishment. The so-called compliment that interrupts a job review, for example. What a beautiful smile you have! Such gorgeous blue eyes! Under that shower of sweet irrelevancies, I sensed immediately that I was no longer a hot prospect for a well paid professional position. I was bed bait, a one dimensional sex object. Did I call out the interviewer? Not then. But I would today.

The distance between leering and the look of love needs light years for measurement.

A hug is not a hug either. Take the exuberant bear hug of long lost friends. See the eyes lit up!  Hear the exuberant cries! This embrace bears absolutely no relation to the repellent office power grab that lasts too long and has the woman wondering how on earth she’ll escape without creating a scene—or losing a job. The hot flab under the suit! The sandpaper jowls! The beard tickle. Ugh!

There’s an easy solution to the abusive hug scenario. Men, for the most part, shake hands in public. Let’s jettison the air kisses for professional women at business meetings. Ditto the all-encompassing arm wrap from male acquaintances encountered at a party.   Trust to a warm firm handshake lit up by a delighted-to-see-or-meet-you smile.

Still, there are plenty of moments that demand physical closeness. When the need’s for comfort and a shoulder to cry on, who worries about male or female? And what kind of idiot rebuffs a gentle, consoling pat on the hand that comes from the “wrong” sex? All of us need generous doses of physical closeness, and anyone with a functioning brain knows the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching. So let’s not go overboard. Let’s not repel the intimacy we need in the course of insulating ourselves from predation.

Males especially need to face the fact that, for lo! these eons of impunity, they have pretended not to notice their colleagues’ abusive behavior. Defying the wolf pack may be tough on those who like being one of the boys, but it’s time for men to speak out. Hey, bro, that’s not the way to go!

As for those still addicted to grabbing pussy and pinching bottoms, the days when the hottie could be trusted to grin-and-bear-it are coming to an end. Expect to see hands slapped away. Expect audible protests. Expect targets to be increasingly immune to character assassination. Expect lost jobs and stained reputations. Not the lady’s.

I once got painfully pinched during a festival in Lahore, Pakistan. Almost automatically, I turned, protested in Urdu and punched the jerk,  striking a blow not only for myself, but for all Western women in Pakistan: we were universally disrespected as “loose.” After that came a moment of terror. The other men in the crowd—how would they behave?

Like gentlemen, as it turned out. They apologized to me. They turned on my molester.

Would I have received the same sympathy from American men? More likely, I’d have been advised to suck it up. Or, worse, been told to take it as a compliment.

Meanwhile, according to Vice President Pence and others of his religious ilk, the solution to the problem of sexual harassment and abuse at work is to segregate men from women, whether to prevent women from being mauled and or—the real motive, I suspect—to protect men from “false” charges. That system might work for the beneficiaries of patriarchy, but it would cripple the ability of women to compete in a “man’s world.”

What’s to be done? For the time being, since too many males in our society have been raised to manhandle any female they can get their paws on, there’s safety in numbers. Public shaming. Public blaming. Above all, swelling the “me-too,” chorus. Bill Clinton toughed it out. Donald Trump became President. Roy Moore may or may not win his election, but he will never be sworn into the Senate. That’s progress.

About Those Tea Parties

Patricia Lee Sharpe

(A review article based on Jane Austen, The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly)

Having popped into the English Department office to register for some courses I hoped to take, I was chatting with the Chairman’s secretary when the Big Man himself burst out of his sanctum. He was waving a fistful of papers, and he was monumentally annoyed.

Only women had registered for his seminar, he grumbled. “It’s going to be a god-damned tea party!” He saw me then, but he didn’t blush.

The scene was funny and infuriating—and typical. Talk about micro aggressions!

No, it wasn’t easy to be a female graduate student in those days, not even in the gyno-ghetto of the humanities. We were, for instance, supposed to admire Ernest Hemingway the macho man as well as his muscular prose, and woe betide us if we revealed that his female characters weren’t real women so much as masturbatory phantasms. And so on. The male view was still the unchallenged norm.

Not So Trivial Pursuits

Nor did the male establishment see much to admire in the works of that reclusive weirdo poet Emily Dickinson (avoid the dreadful new movie about her) let alone the novels of Jane Austin, spinster. Austen did have a wicked way with syntax, they conceded, and her romantic plots generated blockbuster movies decade after decade, but really! Tea parties. Decorous balls. Gossip. Fluttery mothers worried about daughters making a good marriage, or a bad marriage or, worst of all, no marriage at all, which actually was no trivial matter.

Sociologist

And there’s our entry! Meet Jane Austen, sociologist, ruthlessly anatomizing her patriarchal, class-ridden society, its norms and its horrible consequences, especially for women, though younger sons had a pretty tough time, too. Surviving in the social jungle was no picnic, if you weren’t rich, landed, aristocratic and first born. As for females, an unmarried woman was pitiable, although she could own property, while a woman with a man was powerless because hubby got all her property. So life for women was lose-lose, although misery with money was obviously preferable to being poor and slammed around. Austen did a thorough job of showing the fragility of life for the middle and lower classes, too.

Economist

Which brings us to Jane Austen, the economist, sufficiently expert in nuances of property acquisition and management to show up our Trumps and Kushners for the bounders they are, the one a tasteless bling builder, the other a ruthless slum lord. In fact, Austen’s books should probably be read along with tomes like The Wealth of Nations, to understand how the economic system worked at the day-to-day level: how wealth was accumulated, increased, preserved and used to personal advantage as the industrial world was dawning. The novel Emma is like a treatise on the effects of the enclosure acts on British society, according to Kelly. After you’ve read Kelly’s study, Mr. Knightly will never seem so attractive again. As for the wholly admirable Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, having made his money in business, he’s no gentleman—which doesn’t discredit him in Austen’s eyes. She conveys to us very clearly the snobbery, pretension and viciousness of the class system of her day.

Political Scientist

Men! How could so many of them have failed to perceive the extent to which Jane Austen’s novels hinge on the vulnerabilities of England during the Napoleonic Wars? Fears of a French invasion caused defensive military units to be quartered around the country. The resulting inundation of small towns by unprincipled young officers created havoc in local society, as in Pride and Prejudice, where captains and commodores become prime dinner guests and war talk dominates dinner discussions. Kelly reveals to us a novelist wholly aware that England has become a thoroughly militarized society whose rural verities are being challenged by colonial complications and international anxieties.

Theologian

Speaking of colonial complications, although England’s evangelical Christians were at the forefront of nineteenth century efforts to abolish slavery, the Anglican establishment wasn’t so noble, evidently. Wealth derived from the slave-based sugar islands in the Caribbean underpinned the fortunes of the Church and much of the upper class. According to Kelly’s analysis, Austen’s Mansfield Park is virtually a tract on crafty anti-abolitionism. What’s more, although Austen’s novels abound in curates and other ecclesiastical notables, most of them are slimy, opportunistic hypocrites. Think of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Within the whole of Austen’s oeuvre, Kelly notes, there is only one admirable cleric, and that a merely mentioned character in Sense and Sensibility. Was Austen’s condemnation of the whole class accidental? Probably not. She was the daughter of a clergyman.

While warming up to her subject in Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, Helena Kelly writes: “We’re perfectly willing to accept that writers like Wordsworth were fully engaged with everything that was happening and to find the references in their work....But we haven’t been willing to do it with Jane’s work.”

Many of us have sensed the need for a more penetrating look at Jane Austen’s portrait of her times. Helena Kelly has done the analysis. Give Austen’s novels another read. See how much the sexy movies have edited out.

(Note: Kelly should have referred to her subject as "Austen," not "Jane.")

Annals of Appropriation: The Blue Jeans Scandal

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Levi Strauss is probably writhing in his grave. Let’s set him at peace. The outrageous appropriation of his distinctive contribution to American national dress must end—and it must end soon. I’m calling for global closet searches and bon fires. Blue jeans belong in America on Americans.

Until recently I’ve been willing to classify the global dispersion of denim-wear as an extremely successful form of U.S. aid. It’s clear that no American contribution to world welfare has been more popular than blue jeans. They’re practical. They’re durable. They’re machine washable and don’t need ironing—and they don’t wrinkle, if you get the right fit. Above all, they’re cheap. Any one can afford them.

Correction: they should be cheap, which is why I propose to prosecute especially severely those who have not only appropriated our national dress but undermined our national identity, turning good old blue jeans into obscenely expensive designer wear of the sort affordable only by the 5%, thus discriminating against ordinary Americans, who have a right to display their heritage on their own bodies. At the very least these alien brands must named and shamed. Furthermore, patriotic Americans must boycott the entire fashion line any designer who presumes to exploit jeans without concern for American sensitivities.

Excuse me if I also propose that such shocking rip offs be ripped off any non-American daring to flaunt them within 24 hours after a publically announced cut off date. Those who end up in a mooning posture in the middle of a winter snow storm will have only themselves to blame for their exposure.

For the longest time I believed that it might be culturally sensitive, even generous, to overlook this egregious cultural theft, preferring to see it as a form of respect and admiration. But no more—and I’ll tell you why. I bought a great big fuzzy Uzbek sheepskin hat while I was in Central Asia a few months ago. It gets cold in Santa Fe, and an Uzbek hat would solve the annual frostbitten ears problem. If it’s stupid to reinvent the wheel, after all, it’s stupid to reinvent a superb cold weather hat.

No, I wasn’t going to wear my Uzbek prize to a Halloween party replete with ghouls and witches, Batmen and Wonder Women, wookies and vampires. I wasn’t going to turn it into the Central Asian version of “black face.” I was going to wear it as intended, thank you very much.

But just this week I was informed in no uncertain terms that wearing an Uzbek hat as a winter head covering in America would be a highly visible example of cultural appropriation, an affront to proud, respectable Uzbeks—as if it hadn’t been sold to me by proud respectable Uzbeks out to make an honest living. It would be particularly shocking, I was told, on the part of a person who sometimes thinks of herself as a global citizen.

But whoa! Isn’t global citizenship about coming together, getting to know one another and sharing? Sharing music. Sharing ideas. Sharing food. In sum: treasuring traditions and also mixing things up. The sort of thing that Yo Yo Ma does so well. Also the sort of thing that’s truly American. We are such a mish-mash of cultures and customs that we exist in a constant dizzy state of promiscuous cultural appropriation. It’s creative. It’s exciting. What sane person would wish (or try) to unmix the mix? (Except for Donald J. Trump, perhaps, who prefers to divide and conquer.)

I read not so long ago that an American university cafeteria had been excoriated for serving inauthentic Thai and Chinese food, a particularly insulting form of cultural appropriation evidently. Well, if Thai and Chinese has to be removed from the menu, shouldn’t pizza go, too? And French fries! And tamales? And sushi? And so on. Must I eat nothing but baked beans and succotash because of my New England heritage? Must I close the curtains and swear everyone to secrecy when I cook (highly inauthentic) Indian curries?

And so I’m hitting back. If I have to empty my closet because it’s full of Indian garb I’m now forbidden to wear (although no one in India thought it was offensive), it’s time to put a stop to the promiscuous and heinous appropriation of American jeans. What are young men everywhere in the world wearing? Jeans. What are their sisters wearing? Jeans. What are covered women in Saudi Arabia wearing under their abeyas? Jeans. What’s taking the place of sarongs in Tahiti? Jeans. What did smugglers smuggle into the Soviet Union? Jeans. What did our Uzbek guides in Tashkent wear? Jeans. It has to stop.

Jeans are an American cultural treasure. Given the current thinking on cultural appropriation, all jeans must be repatriated or destroyed. Those who resist must be shamed and shunned, if not shot.  Let Levi Strauss rest in peace.

 

Minnie: Puccini's Girl of the Golden West

By Patricia H Kushlis

The Santa Fe Opera’s production of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West (La Fanciulla Del West) opened the 41st season July 1 with Patricia Racette starring as Minnie. Although Giacomo Puccini considered it his best opera, the reviews at the time were mixed.  He composed the opera between 1907 and 1910 and based it on a popular play by American David Belasco which Puccini had seen in New York.

The play and the opera were set in a gold mining camp in 1849 in the “Cloudy Mountains” apocryphally named for California’s Sierra-Nevadas.  Minnie was the keeper of the camp’s Polka Saloon yet supposedly as pure as the driven snow and as pious as Jesus.  In the opera, but not the play, she was portrayed as a teacher who taught the supposedly illiterate miners not only how to read but also good old fashioned redemption through Bible verses.   Her sole rival was Nina Micheltorena, a prostitute from Cachuca who ran the local brothel.  Nina, however, never appears on or off stage, but we hear plenty about her nevertheless.  (Photo left: Patricia Racette as Minnie, (c) Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera)

The reviews suggest that The Girl of the Golden West was basically ahead of its time perhaps most importantly musically.   The major melodies are assigned to the orchestra and they, unlike in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and La Boheme, are also often fragmented, presented in slivers and not necessarily developed beyond the initial phrase or phrases.  Two of the three major themes at least are distinctly American folk but neither have California roots.    Furthermore, Minnie’s theme is never sung by Minnie but played by the orchestra during her various entrances as well as sung by her lover (Johnson/Ramerrez) near the opera’s conclusion.

Yet if you think of the period in which this opera was written and that Puccini was influenced by Richard Wagner, Debussy and Puccini's contemporary Richard Strauss, Puccini composed The Girl of the Golden West during a time of tremendous artistic and social flux, innovation and impending international turmoil and disintegration.  This had been set off by incompetent political leaders harnessing  the immense physical power of the industrial revolution.  From Russian composers Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev, Spain's early Pablo Picasso, the Russian Avant Garde movement and the soon to come tragedy of World War I which tore Europe and the Middle East apart, it’s easier to understand the context of Puccini’s innovations in this ahead-of-its-time opera.

Art is not created in a vacuum.

Puccini had already broken ground by featuring stories about everyday people so The Girl of the Golden West follows in the same vein but, despite its happy ending, it's the musical fragmentation that most foreshadows the disturbing future.  His musical innovations also include use of the whole tone scale as well as the incorporation of a Zuni (New Mexican, not California Native American tribe, located 150 miles west of Albuquerque) melody as one of its three main themes.    A second melodic fragment and leitmotiv is the theme of the African-American dance known as “The Cakewalk” which was wildly popular throughout the US at the time Puccini was composing the opera.

Much is made of the redemption concept but in this opera, that really pertains exclusively to men.  Either women are apparently not redeemable – as in the case of the never-seen-or-heard Nina - or didn’t need redeeming, as Minnie.

But what seems to be shorted in reviews of the time and has reverberated in some later ones too is the importance and centrality of women in America’s settlement of the West.   Minnie’s personification of the independent, take-no-prisoners Western woman is, I would argue, the real theme of this opera.  Not only did she carry a gun and knew how to use it, (see photo right (c)Ken Howard for the Santa Fe Opera 2016) but she also owned property - in her case the Polka and her cabin in the woods – unlike women in the US and elsewhere yet to obtain even the basic right of property ownership let alone the vote. 

The letters home and journals that women who took part in the Western migration kept religiously or otherwise detailing their experiences demonstrate this unequivocally. 

Coupling Today in America: Who’s Making It (with Whom)

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Lu marries Tham, but Chen marries Healy. Flannagan marries Kennedy, but Roberts marries Maheshwari.

So the U.S. is still a melting pot, ethnically.

But wait: birds of a feather—East Asian as well as Irish—are definitely flocking together.

Both, obviously, are true, from the evidence of the matrimonial announcements published on May 15th in the New York Times. Actually there were only 20 items, but they tell a powerful story about who’s making it—and who’s not, colorfully confirming more abstract analyses.

First the photos: remember the time not so long ago when you did a double take at the first couples photos? Portraits of bride and groom in mufti, that is, instead of a generic Barbie doll topped with a veil, as if a wedding were a solo performance. And then something else happened: a same sex marriage was celebrated pictorially in the newspaper of record. Imagine the editorial discussions preceding the breaking of this barrier a few years ago, especially since there are still some bakers, professedly Christian, who balk at making a wedding cake for a non-heterosexual couple? Two brides on top. Awesome! Anyone who finds love is to be congratulated—and envied.  This batch of matrimonials includes same sex partnerships of the male and female ilk as well as traditional couples.

So who performed the marriages that got announced on May 15th—and where did the couples choose to get married? Once again, it looks as if diversity thrives. Rabbis. Episcopal officiants (one of them a woman). A Greek Orthodox priest. A Lutheran minister and a pastor from the United Church of Christ. A Hindu priest. A judge. Several Universal Life ministers, which seems to be a frequent recourse for secular people with a spiritual nature and a taste for ritual—or perhaps with warring families of different faiths. Conclusion: freedom of (and from) religion is alive and well in America, despite the absence of Muslims in this sample, which I’d be inclined to attribute, not to snobbery or bigotry, but to the distribution of wealth and the related Times subscription base, about which more below.

The where of the weddings is roughly predictable from the affiliation of the officiants. Churches, including a cathedral. Synagogues. Resort and event venues. A judge’s chambers. A couple of country clubs, including the not so countrified and suddenly salient Mar-a-Lago.

Some brides kept their names, others didn’t, at a ratio of somewhat less than two of the former to one of the latter. Women who kept their own names looked to be very successful professionally, but among those who chose the Mrs. degree, there wasn’t a single bride who seemed to be a candidate for traditionally dependent housewifery. Also interesting: last names gave no clue as to who’d be changing and who’d be keeping her name.

So, well established professionals are marrying professionals, which tends to boost household income well into the six figures of comfortable, upper middle class life. What’s more, most of the parents of this cohort of the newly married , that's mothers as well as fathers, also appear to be successful managers or professionals, which makes for strong class continuity even as ethnicity fades in importance. If successful men these days are universally marrying their female peers, an important upward mobility ladder for disadvantaged young women has vanished. And so these apparently innocent matrimonials confirm a trend: the U.S. is becoming an ever more sharply differentiated class society, with an increasing income gap between upper and lower classes.

Meaning: our story darkens. The people who wished to publicize their happiness in the NYT belong to a financially privileged class, some of whom may even be able to buy those multi million dollar condos advertised every Sunday, which may be one reason why, during my occasional perusing of Times matrimonials, I’ve never encountered a Muslim marriage (which doesn't mean there haven't been any). It’s said that Muslims have been more fully assimilated in the U.S. than in other Western countries, but their visible presence at high income, leadership levels remains minuscule. In some such cases, of course, photos of the bride would be taboo, which isn’t necessarily a disqualifier. Most but not all NYT announcements are accompanied by pictures—and surely it would be possible to accommodate a photo of groom only, if it came to that.

What’s more, and far more distressing, as some readers may already have discerned, there were no Latinos or Black Americans (not couples, not even one side of a partnership) among the matrimonial announcements on May 15th. Given U.S. demographics, these absences testify to the lack of educational and economic opportunity faced by a huge proportion of the current U.S. population. The massively disadvantaged don’t have anything to crow about in the pages of the NYT.

All in all, then, here’s the good news from Sunday May 15th: Women have a solid toehold on the professional world, and they aren’t giving it up. Ethnicity is of indifferent importance when it comes to personal happiness. A wildly variegated freedom of religion thrives. But there’s truly bad news, too. It’s conveyed by omission. Blacks, Latinos and Muslims aren’t making it.

And, at last! here’s the dope you unhappy singles have been slavering for: where the lovers met. I found a mix of the old and the new. Several couples found one another through OKCupid.com or Match.com. But more were brought together by friends or met in college. And two pairs of future spouses met in a bar.

There is, evidently, no one path to true love.

 

Microaggression: Let’s Pull Together

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The following comes from a Danish reader’s letter to the editors of The Economist: “As one of the octogenarians who ‘fiddles with my hearing aid and takes afternoon naps,’ I wonder what the age limit is in order to avoid being ridiculed by your young reporters?”

So black people aren’t the only ones who are deeply hurt by careless speech that insults and belittles—verbal shrapnel, essentially. But we can be grateful to the young African-Americans at Yale for calling the phenomenon to our attention—and for demanding an end to it.

Microagression: it’s a term that hasn’t had wide circulation until recently. But it’s a good one, and it’s often a sign of ageism or sexism as well as racism.

I’ve felt the first two—and just imagine the double whammy of being an older woman! Imperfect body a constant butt of jokes to say nothing of revulsion. Every search for le mot juste or for car keys becomes a “senior moment,” symptom of imminent Alzheimers. I’m pretty sick of it. (I even wrote a story called “Senior Moments.” It’s in my book Driving under the Influence. Just click on the title in the “Our Books” list.)

So what I’m suggesting here and now is that we incessantly insulted segments of the population should make common cause instead of competing for first prize in the angry victimhood contest. Whenever we feel the painful stab of microaggression, as the Yale students suggest, we shouldn’t shrug it off. We should call attention to the insult, the cruelty, the insufferability.

“Don’t be so sensitive!” We’ll get that from a lot of perpetrators, but the smartest retort is simple: “Don’t be so insensitive.”

Meanwhile, we ourselves need to be sensitive to the fact that what seems like microaggression may not, in all cases, be consciously intended as such. First of all, some people come across as offensive because they are clumsily inarticulate in all situations. They need help with both social and language skills. Others are mentally inert clones of a passé culture. They’ve inherited attitudes they’ve never felt free to examine or even, in many cases, been conscious of. These people need to be liberated intellectually or by positive personal experience, not ultimata.

Others are the victims of language itself.

The thing is that language has evolved over centuries, picking up some good stuff and some bad stuff along the way. Society also changes over time. But social and linguistic change aren’t always in sync, and cleaning out the linguistic attic isn’t a chore that most people have ever seen as a necessary task. Encouraged to become conscious of the hateful cliches they spout, the dismissive labels, the ridicule masquerading as a joke, they may discover that this frozen language doesn’t reflect their own thoughts and experience. Do they really think that Blacks are intellectually inferior? Do they really think women are nothing but sex objects? Do they really think that old people are overly expensive, useless drags on the economy? Maybe not, when they come to actually think about it. They need help to get beyond myth and stereotyping.

What I’m trying to suggest is that not all offensive language is evidence of determined, irredeemable bigotry. Not every thoughtless comment is evidence of crypto-racism. Making offenders face the import and impact of what they have said will change the nature of discourse more effectively than reciprocal insult. This is not to say that repetition and more repetition may not be needed. But water erodes the hardest rock.

As for me, I am deep down furious when people treat me condescendingly, as if aging has made me into an idiot, but I am also reminded of a distinction that Buddhists make. Intentionality is the key. If no harm is consciously intended, the offense may be unfortunate, but forgivable. Cultivating greater awareness is the cure.   As my Grandmother said, "Think before you speak." But if the harm was by intent, it is something that has to be taken very seriously indeed. In that case, how best to counteract the bigotry?

Which brings me to this: will we focus on chewing out the people who insult us or can we join hands to build a better society? The former is almost irresistible, of course, but the latter is the best way to win. Instead of dwelling on personal pain, here are the big undone things we can achieve only by supporting one another in the effort. Truly equal voting rights. Equal pay for equal work. Shame-free security in old age. All good for everyone of us.

Even after trying to be as understanding as possible of as many people as possible I have to admit that there are some hard core bigots who will never see the light, but it doesn't help to behave like them.

Look at it this way: no one likes ants, but if the picnic is really really good, it’s fairly easy to brush off a few ants.