My Blog Week: September 20 to September 26

A Word on the Week

Hold the Bird

Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa, tweeted this week about a pigeon found dead on his farm. This narrative somewhat incoherent and persistently ill-spelled, flashed for a while in the pan of the Twitterverse. Whether Grassley has believed lifelong that the bird is a pidgin, or whether he is striking an attitude for the voters, the incident raises a question, worth the weighing.

What kind of error is a spelling error? Is it harmless and easily fixed? Is it likely, in nonpolitical circumstances, that anyone misspells with malignant intent? Is, “Thanks, I’ll fix that”, the better response, or “I don’t need your elitist bulls**t, Libtard!”?

But then is, “No points off! I just thought you’d want to get that”, the better way of indicating an error, or “Har har! What a moron! Where’d you go to school?”

As a culture we should ask.

Let’s for the sake of definition say that a mistake is something that can’t be repaired, only atoned for. An error is something reversible. Not taking coronavirus seriously has been (on the part of the current U.S. administration) a mistake. It’s instead of its is an error, put right in a jiffy.

Why should it be, then, that while few human beings have done anything in the category of an error that resulted in anyone’s death, ruination of their business, destruction of their home life…or other assorted grim fates…millions of people have painful memories of being scorned and/or ridiculed for spelling, grammar, punctuation errors? And other small things: unpolished table manners, bad fashion, naïve comments. 

Errors are easy to spot, but why is the mistaken habit of gloating over them, humiliating someone for making one, so densely rooted in our culture? We would like people to feel bad for doing bad things, we would like feelings of shame to be natural corollaries to shameful acts, but overvaluing the petty, inducing the worst of human discomfort for the least of costs, means that when bad people defy principles of decent, compassionate governing, they can cheaply access the huge, hurting core of our self-pitying nation—the paper worked on for hours, bumped down to a B-minus for a missing comma; the appointment cancelled for a five-minute’s late arrival (and so many more examples)—and conflate the calling for accountability in the face of gross mistakes with nitpicking, unfairness?