Is anybody here xenophobic? Well...I've never thought of anybody here as xenophobic. I mean, GBP's parents used to operate "The International House" on the boardinghouse row near a university. Adayahi volunteered for overseas service in the Army and, unlike some combat veterans, can still stand the sight of people from the country where he served. I was taught foreign languages and told to request a foreign-born roommate, for language practice, at church college, before living in madly multiethnic Takoma Park, before marriage to a foreign-born husband. My town was built on the ruins of a trading post where people whose tribes and nations had been at war with each other used to achieve peace through intermarriage. There are a few countries where nobody at this web site has any known relatives, but it's only a matter of time.
Islamophobic? Hello...my adoptive brother was a Muslim, which means the clients who really got my desperate little odd-jobs service going were Muslims; I've copy-edited Islamic Studies documents; I've eaten and prayed and danced and slept back-to-back with Muslims. But I do think lines need to be drawn somewhere and enforcing sharia religious law in the United States, or letting U.S. towns be colonized by trainloads of healthy young male "refugees" with a pronounced lack of resemblance to the abandoned elders and wounded children photographed in Aleppo, seem like two reasonable places to draw some lines.
I don't believe Hillary Clinton would have the gall to call me xenophobic or Islamophobic to my face. I do believe Rahm Emmanuel would. Also sexist, of course, don't forget sexist. Also, although Hillary Clinton wouldn't stoop to mention it, Rahm Emmanuel would: when a descendant of at least ten generations of active and well-known Christians has the chutzpah to "look Jewish," which I do, there are those who consider that Christian antisemitic if s/he either does or doesn't instantly deny all connection with Judaism.
Also, people like that believe that anyone who is legally White is automatically racist, even if "unconsciously," just because s/he is automatically guilty of having enjoyed some sort of benefits from racism. Even if those benefits consist mainly of being asked for dates by guys s/he wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole, having once been offered service ahead of someone who was waiting first, and having encountered common courtesy rather than egregious rudeness on some occasions. Even if the person has also enjoyed some benefits from being perceived as other-than-White. As far as people like that are concerned, I'm definitely a racist...and people like that do make me feel a little less bad about the fact that real racists exist, because people like that should only run up against one of them.
So are we deplorable yet? Do you feel deplorable? I'm feeling deplorable. On consideration, I think "deplorable" may have just grown a reflexive usage, in the same (grotesque, to me, and annoying) way "hopefully" and "grieve" have grown such usages. Y'know, the logical meaning of "Hopefully, Tracy will go to the store" can only be "Tracy will go to the store in a hopeful manner," but people say it, all the time, when they mean "I am hoping that Tracy will go to the store so that I don't have to go there." The logical meaning of "He is still grieving his father" can only be "He is still causing grief to his father," but people say it, quite often, when they mean "He is still grieving for the loss of his father." So perhaps, since we don't have a word like "deplore-ful," "deplorable" can be used to mean "feeling intensely conscious of all that we deplore about the Clinton campaign, and/or the Trump campaign, and/or the whole concept of an election between these two disasters when even the Democrats have more electable candidates."
There is so much about this election to deplore...I'm feeling, in a very neologistic and no doubt annoying way, so-o-o deplorable. Or at least deploreful. Deploring?
This web site officially deplores Mrs. Clinton's characterization of those planning not to vote for her as a "basket of deplorable" bigots or phobics. This web site also particularly deplores Mrs. Clinton's failure to recognize elitism as the third major form of bigotry, and the most insidious and least successfully overturned, in the United States today.
(We are talking about the same Hillary Rodham Clinton who was once reportedly caught hissing to Bill at a party, "Don't talk to those people. They're not rich: they're useless." Obviously she meant "useless for our immediate fundraising purposes" more than "useless generally, as human beings"...but ohhh, the microaggression.)
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