Dennis Perrin, who I’ve just realised is the same bloke as the Dennis Perrin I used to have really nasty flamewars with on a mailing list five years ago, has a post up which, among other things, mentions a bumper sticker he recently saw which read:
“As Hillary, Nancy and Jennifer Rise In Stature, They Give New Meaning To The Phrase Ho Ho Ho!”
Well it got me thinking. Quite a number of points, below. I tried, but failed, to keep the footnotes under control this time.
So anyway, the guy driving the truck wants to make the point that Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Jennifer ErrrmNoIdeaSorry[1] are whores. I must say by the way that if I was Scoop Doggy Dogg[2] or Iceberg Slim, I would probably be dropping the slang term “ho” from my vocabulary, as it has pretty much been devalued by the squares. It’s a pretty crude political insult, but I’m hardly in a position to pass comment on that specifically.
Rather, my interest is piqued by the fact that considered merely as a joke, it has a lot of disadvantages. For one thing, it’s not funny. I would imagine that nearly everyone in the world says at least three things funnier than “As Hillary, Nancy and Jennifer Rise In Stature, They Give New Meaning To The Phrase Ho Ho Ho!” in an average day. I suspect that Lenny Bruce or Billy Connolly could have done something with the concept, perhaps along the lines of a reverie of department store Santas abandoning their traditional motto to shout “Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Jennifer DDToCheckThisOne Are Whores!”. But even a true comic genius would be hard pushed – it’s just really not very funny.
Furthermore, it’s bloody long. You would need a big car to fit that slogan on, and anyone reading it would need to be pretty close in order to take it in. Bumper stickers are surely meant to be short and snappy – that one has two commas and a subordinate clause.
But the killer for me is that it’s an amazingly time-limited joke even at the best of times. “As Hillary, Nancy and Jennifer Rise In Stature, They Give New Meaning To The Phrase Ho Ho Ho!” is pretty bad in November and December, but this bumper sticker clearly times out on January 1 of next year, when presumably it need to be replaced with .. with .. help me, I’m drying up here .. with some joke based on “Happy New Year” which somehow manages to incorporate some reference to Hillary Clinton being a whore. The guy who bought this bumper sticker is therefore quite likely to be a regular repeat purchaser of unfunny political joke bumper stickers – I’d hazard a guess that he’s buying a new one every month. And peeling off old bumper stickers to put on a new one is no joke; it’s quite an irksome job scraping off those little bits of paper unless bumper sticker technology has improved massively in the last few years.
The economics of it all are fascinating. This is a terrible product, I think we can agree. It’s a political advert, with really lazy copywriting and a needlessly foreshortened shelf life. I would be really interested in knowing how these things are marketed (I’m assuming that they are marketed here – it’s just struck me that it might be possible to buy special bumper-sticker kits for a PC printer[3] and make up your own. In this case, they’d be a sort of folk art, which is interesting enough in itself).
My guess is that they’re an impulse buy, surely. I can sort of see how it gets bought; you wake up in one of those misogynistic moods that strike us all from time to time, you hear on the radio that Hillary, Nancy or Jennifer has done or said something annoying again, you’re listening to Snoop talking about “hos”[4] on the radio (or possibly William Buckley Jr talking about hos, every fucker seems to be doing it these days, grumble hrrpmh), then as you’re paying for your petrol, you notice that joke on a bumper sticker next to the till, you chuckle a bit and then before you have a chance to think rationally, “no, that’s actually quite a lame joke and in any case it will look really stupid when it’s out of date in five weeks’ time”, you’ve bought the thing. They write textbooks on how to sell products through exactly that sort of semi-conscious behaviour.
It’s either that or a sort of “Rude Bumper-Sticker Of The Month Club”, which is the sort of thing I would not previously have thought economically viable, but the Regnery litigation has already thrown up the interesting fact that this sort of club is apparently an important organising mechanism for movement conservatism in middle America. So it’s possible that the driver of this car just got signed up to receive these bumper stickers along with a newsletter that he really wanted, and the actual though process was along the lines of “god, the fucking Regnery free sticker is a bit dreadful this month. Still, better put it on the bumper, because if I miss a month I’ll get out of the habit and they’ll go to waste. Besides, that ‘[DD INSERT HALLOWEEN-THEMED POLITICAL WHORE JOKE HERE][5] is looking a bit lame, it’s halfway through November.” So perhaps the buyers do take a more critical attitude to these stickers than you’d necessarily suspect. Either way, I absolutely 100% refuse to believe that their purchase is the result of considered search in a normal shopping environment.
Postscript: There’s certainly a way in which this piece could be read in which it’s just a bit of pure class snobbery, looking down on the driver of this truck for being such a rube. Although that’s partly the case, I want to walk away from that sort of sentiment, a bit. For one thing, the buyer of this sticker presumably knows who “Jennifer” is, which means he’s better-informed about US politics than I am. For another, this sort of mindless misogynistic abuse actually has quite a distinguished tradition in Anglo-Saxon politics, going back to, for example, John Knox and the “monstrous regiment of women”. And if you actually read some of Knox’s philippics, which are quite frequently praised to the skies by historians for their rhetoric, a lot of them are not really very far above the level of “As Elizabeth and Mary Rise In Stature, They Give New Meaning To The Phrase Whore of Babylon!”. The sentiment expressed is repulsive, and anyone buying these bumper stickers is a knob, for sure, but I for one am under no illusions that the sentiment is any less prevalent among those socioeconomic classes that have the common sense to not advertise them on their cars.
[1](I am not kidding here; I literally have no idea who “Jennifer” might be in this context. It possibly says something in itself about the state of American politics that in order to maintain the comedy convention of the Rule of Three, the sticker writer had to fish right down into the lower divsions of obscurity to find a third female politician to call a whore)
[2]That was originally a typo, but the idea of someone halfway between Snoop and the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson seemed so intrinsically hilarious that I left it in. There has got to be a sitcom in there somewhere – “Scoop ‘n’ Snoop: Hilarious oddball comedy with the two ill-assorted flatmates!”.
[3]Yes, I concede that someone printing off ” As Hillary, Nancy and Jennifer Rise In Stature, They Give New Meaning To The Phrase Ho Ho Ho!” bumper stickers is massively more likely to own a PC than a Mac, are you happy now Kieran?
[4]What is the fucking plural there?
[5]I hope you realise that this isn’t me gradually realising that this stuff is harder to write than it looks, it isn’t. It’s just that all the jokes you can actually do are so offensively lame that continuing the running joke is funnier. The one I had teed up was “WHEN WILL HILLARY LET THE MASK SLIP? OH NO, THAT WAS HER FACE!”. I defy any of you fuckers to honestly say it’s worse than the one that got printed and marketed.
{ 64 comments }
abb1 11.30.07 at 10:28 am
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071115/od_afp/lifestyleaustraliachristmasoffbeat
SYDNEY (AFP) – Santas in Australia’s largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas’s traditional “ho ho ho” greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.
Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say “ha ha ha” instead, the Daily Telegraph reported.
One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and was too close to “ho”, a US slang term for prostitute.
stuart 11.30.07 at 10:40 am
Maybe the third was Governor Jennifer Granholm (D-MI), assuming it was a Michigan plate?
John Holbo 11.30.07 at 10:50 am
” … I must say by the way that if I was Scoop Doggy Dogg[2] or Iceberg Slim”
I think it would be very interesting if you turned out to be Iceberg Slim.
Dan Hunter 11.30.07 at 10:51 am
Wonderful post. Very cute.
Oh, for the other completists out there: Perrin’s post explains that the “Jennifer” is Jennifer Granholm, the Governor of Michigan (where the truck-drivin’, bumper-sticker-totin’ man was seen).
magistra 11.30.07 at 11:41 am
It’s not just a pathetic joke, it doesn’t even work as allegedly political commentary. Because it’s talking about women, the immediate implication is that ‘ho’ means these women are sexually promiscuous. I suspect the reader would be thinking ‘how did I miss those sex scandals?’ and by the time they’d worked out that the sticker meant prostituting themselves politically (which would be the obvious message if you called a male politician a whore), they’d have crashed their own car. Or does ‘ho’ no longer have any meaning in US culture more specific than ‘woman I don’t like?’
MR. Bill 11.30.07 at 11:56 am
There is a whole right wing industry/advertising campaign to float memes that denigrate the opposition, in a way the left is not organized,in the US. See http://myrightwingdad.net/
I get forwards from a lot of folks. One is contractor who is a big wheel in local Republican politics. Most of his are bumpersticker-like bits:
a literal bumpersticker was “Life’s a bitch, don’t vote for one” with a picture of Mrs. Clinton. And I get 3-4 a week, despite askinf him to stop.
It’s juvenile and nothing to do with policy, but works very well for the political Right in this country.
bad Jim 11.30.07 at 12:20 pm
I’ve just cut down from two bumper-stickers to one. The magnetic “WTF?” with a goofy Bush photo was a birthday present from my niece. I got the same question a few times from people older than me: I like your sticker, but WTF does “WTF” mean? About half the time they’d get it when I just stared back.
One nephew-in-law admired the Ira[q/n] sticker, and it peeled off perfectly cleanly. I transplanted it to a slice of wax paper, and maybe I’ll send it to him.
I replaced it with a very silly “Freethinker” logo, for no other reason than that my brother added “God is just pretend” to his cluster of expressions of frustration and enthusiasm (“How About A Threesome?” turns out to be about triathlons.) Bush is already in the historical dustbin, that teaching moment is past, so this might not be the worst time to celebrate godlessness.
Ray 11.30.07 at 12:26 pm
“Hilary, Nancy, Jennifer – Ho Ho Ho”
Not quite rocket science, is it?
dsquared 11.30.07 at 12:30 pm
2,4: ahh thanks.
“Life’s a bitch, don’t vote for one†with a picture of Mrs. Clinton.
which still has a comma in it, but is more recognisably a snappy phrase. Clearly this guy shops at the good rude moron bumper sticker place.
Slocum 11.30.07 at 1:25 pm
I am not kidding here; I literally have no idea who “Jennifer†might be in this context. It possibly says something in itself about the state of American politics.
Yes, as suggested, Jennifer is Jennifer Granholm of Michigan.
BTW, does this get all us Americans off the hook for not knowing the leaders of any country of 10 million or less?
dsquared 11.30.07 at 1:35 pm
“Hilary, Nancy, Jennifer – Ho Ho Hoâ€
Not quite rocket science, is it?
I would even make it more pictorial, just Photoshop a Santa hat onto a picture of the three of them and caption it “HO, HO, HO”. We could make a profit out of this shit.
John Emerson 11.30.07 at 1:41 pm
Jennifer Granholm is an alien, by the way. Maybe legal, maybe not, but unquestionably an alien.
Ray 11.30.07 at 1:45 pm
Unfortunately, Regnery will be doing the distribution. That probably explains it all – if the level of sales is guaranteed, and the royalties are guaranteed to be miniscule, it literally isn’t worth spending the three seconds to go from “As Hillary, Nancy and Jennifer Rise In Stature, They Give New Meaning To The Phrase Ho Ho Ho!†to “Hilary, Nancy, Jennifer – Ho Ho Hoâ€
Or maybe its a Soviet planning thing, where the sticker writers are paid by the word.
bob mcmanus 11.30.07 at 1:50 pm
Well, when I was a young punk, some around me had a different meaning for “ho”, as in “hole”. The idea was that women were of no more value than a knothole, donut, or anything else you can “stick your d### in”. Yes, it’s pretty insulting and ugly.
But in that case “rising in stature while giving new meaning to [hole,hole,hole]” does make at least a little sense.
abb1 11.30.07 at 1:51 pm
With ‘Jennifer’ being the Michigan governor, is it really that likely that the sticker is distributed by Regnery or any other national business or organization?
dsquared 11.30.07 at 1:52 pm
I don’t know. Frankly if someone is mad enough to manufacture the fucking thing in the first place, I’m not sure that my intuitions about what else they might consider sensible in distributing it are reliable.
rea 11.30.07 at 1:56 pm
Jennifer Granholm is an alien, by the way
No, she’s a naturalized US citizen, just like whats-his-name out in California, or Mitt Romney’s BFF, Zalmay Khalilzad.
bob mcmanus 11.30.07 at 2:05 pm
5:”the immediate implication is that ‘ho’ means these women are sexually promiscuous”
I just presented the line to someone next to me around my age, and she got it right away. Not “whore” but “hole.” Actually, for someone not British who have a different meaning, it is considerably nastier than c***, which at least has residual femaleness attached.
Has that meaning so disappeared? Obviously not.
SamChevre 11.30.07 at 2:13 pm
Bumper stickers are amazing.
If you want to be amazed greatly, go to a gun show and look at the bumper stickers. They’ll vary from strident to macho to off-the-charts weird.
Ralph Hitchens 11.30.07 at 2:22 pm
Dennis Perrin is entertaining, but hard, hard left — even harder on the liberal Democrats than the GOP.
dsquared 11.30.07 at 2:30 pm
If you think Dennis is hard, hard left, I could show you some mailing lists that would blow your mind.
denise 11.30.07 at 2:33 pm
As a non-Michigander, I love Jennifer Granholm. She started cursing when a reporter asked her about Richardson’s national water policy.
harry b 11.30.07 at 2:51 pm
Bob — are you seriously saying you were young, once? I wasn’t.
far-right Republican relatives are extremely loose with their language, and I suspecyt
harry b 11.30.07 at 2:54 pm
Bob — are you seriously saying you were young, once? I wasn’t.
Some of my far-right Republican relatives are extremely loose with their language, and I suspect that they, at least, understand “ho” in DD’s rather the bob’s way, and apply it indiscrimately to women they dislike. A bit like “bastard”. Even after all these years such behaviour makes me feel like saying “Hey, wait, you’re conservatives, you’re supposed to uphold conservative standards of behaviour, like those that I follow”. I don’t. But the fact that despite being a socialist I am, actually, a conservative unlike them, does hover uncomfortably in the background.
aaron 11.30.07 at 2:55 pm
this bumper sticker attempt at humor is to what ann coulter’s punditry amounts, is it not?
Dennis Perrin 11.30.07 at 3:12 pm
What does “hard, hard left” mean in this context? There are Marxists who think I’m soft, and anarchists who think I’m a liberal. Branding’s so subjective.
BTW, that bumper sticker looked homemade — well done, but not mass produced.
John Emerson 11.30.07 at 3:22 pm
An alien’s an alien, Rea.
Mrs Tilton 11.30.07 at 3:30 pm
John @12:
Jennifer Granholm is an alien, by the way. Maybe legal, maybe not, but unquestionably an alien
Good point. Which means, of course, that if you’re in a bar-fight with her, a knee to the groin will be useless. You’ll want to give her a karate-chop to the armpit.
Drake 11.30.07 at 3:54 pm
You could extend the bumper sticker’s shelf-life by reinterpreting it as insinuating that Hillary, Nancy and Jennifer are cylindrical, frosted, cream-filled cakes.
kth 11.30.07 at 3:55 pm
I think the Imus saga may have been partly the inspiration for the sticker. The guy in the truck thinks it sucks that white people can’t use the same language on TV/radio that black people use on recordings, so saying ‘ho’ feels like an act of defiance to him.
Stigand 11.30.07 at 4:01 pm
What’s especially maddening about this sort of rubbish is that if you start to argue that it makes no sense, you’ve already lost.
The slightly non-sensical catchiness of the slogans is part of the message: ‘we don’t need your fancy-shmancy “logic” ‘.
I remember think the same thing of the Socialist Worker slogans and chants I used to encounter as a student. (Which goes to show that idiocy is not always and everywhere a right-wing phenomenon.)
harry b 11.30.07 at 4:08 pm
drake — they’d have to be funny cakes, to explain the extra “ho”.
jayinbmore 11.30.07 at 4:47 pm
20,21: Perrin was a Hitchens acolyte, which would explain both the “hard on the Dems” bit and also the crazy stuff dd saw on mailing lists. He’s since turned in his membership card to that particular club.
blatherskite 11.30.07 at 4:51 pm
An awful lot of right-wing “humor” just seems to be snide or mean, and not a lot else. Recently Huckabee made a ‘joke’ that consisted of saying something like “Maybe we should send Hillary to Mars” during a discussion of NASA. Not a joke in any way other than indicating he’d like to kill Hillary.
Limbaugh’s most famous “jokes” are just meanness , but at least with a little word-play (Feminazi, tree-hugger). But mainly snide and/or mean.
And from the site MyRightWingDad.net (noted above) we also have “Life’s a Bitch: Don’t Vote For One” bumper sticker featuring an image of Senator Clinton.
http://myrightwingdad.blogspot.com/2007/11/ffw-new-bumper-sticker.html
Successful lefty humor (I’ll include Daily Show and Colbert) may have a component of meanness, but it’s generally not the whole shebang.
Martin James 11.30.07 at 4:54 pm
I don’t think anyone here is the target audience for the bumper sticker.
You’ve missed the point of “rise in stature”.
The point is that as these women assume the historically masculine role of power – in the parlance as they “get their dick on” there’s no need to worry since they aren’t really in charge they are still performing for “the man”, that is the money (the ho, ho ho connection brings up the image of Santa an older, white bearded male who brings the goodies).
belle le triste 11.30.07 at 5:18 pm
think “ho ho ho!” as in “westward ho!” and drake’s suggestion works fine
(now name four other towns that come with in-built punctuation)
engels 11.30.07 at 5:32 pm
For one thing, the buyer of this sticker presumably knows who “Jennifer†is, which means he’s better-informed about US politics than I am.
You are being to charitable. The speaker doesn’t know who Hillary, Nancy or Jennifer are and the sticker also contains a spelling mistake. The corrected version reads:
“As Hillary, Nancy and Jennifer Rise In Stature, They Give New Meaning To The Phrase [W]Ho [W]Ho [W]Hoâ€
goatchowder 11.30.07 at 5:52 pm
Why didn’t the sticker simply call them “poopy-heads” and be done with it?
Politics is stupid.
Bobcat 11.30.07 at 6:40 pm
I would have enjoyed “As Hilary, Nancy and Jennifer Rise in Stature, they are more likely to become goatfuckers.” It would not have been my expected ending, and so the gestalt shift would have been pretty enjoyable.
I think there’s some good right-wing humor out there, though. South Park has had some tremendous episodes. (Some stinkers, too, of course.)
Grand Moff Texan 11.30.07 at 6:44 pm
I would probably be dropping the slang term “ho†from my vocabulary, as it has pretty much been devalued by the squares
If it’s been appropriated by a Hillaryphobe (the kind of people who think she’s a communist or that she somehow represents the radical left), then yes, the word has gone mall-ternative.
.
Bryan 11.30.07 at 7:22 pm
It is amazing there is a market for Michigan-centric holiday-themed misogynistic right-wing bumper stickers.
Barry 11.30.07 at 7:39 pm
Michigan is a weird state; it would be red except for the Detroit area, which turns it blue (politics is, um, ‘colorful’, for those who get it). It’s also a state in which the dominant industry has been under a 30 year losing battle. This leads to a bunch of p*ssed-off white men looking for people to blame. Remember that in the 1990’s, Michigan was a major center of the militia movement.
JP Stormcrow 11.30.07 at 7:50 pm
This leads to a bunch of p*ssed-off white men looking for people to blame.
Yeah, like that fat guy….
Slocum 11.30.07 at 9:11 pm
Michigan is a weird state; it would be red except for the Detroit area, which turns it blue (politics is, um, ‘colorful’, for those who get it).
You could say that about many states. Illinois, for example, would be red without the Chicago area.
With respect to Michigan, keep in mind that the Detroit metro area is where most of the people in the state live (though Detroit itself has shrunk, the metro area hasn’t).
This leads to a bunch of p*ssed-off white men looking for people to blame.
To the extent that’s true, they tend to be blue-collar Democrats. Go to the Republican west side of the state, and you won’t find a lot of laid-off autoworkers (p*ssed-off or otherwise).
John Emerson 11.30.07 at 9:29 pm
Michigan is the place in the North where the largest population of extremely honky white guys lives closest to the largest population of extremely black black guys. The combination has given us Mitch Ryder, Ted Nugent, Iggy Pop, the MC5, and so on.
Kathleen 11.30.07 at 9:32 pm
I don’t know, I would have to agree with the earlier poster that guessed this one is DIY. Like, sure, it’s misogynistic and mean and not very funny and there’s a HUGE market for that, but it’s also just off: the strange connection to Christmas and Santa to me points to the workings of one weird mind set loose on the cultural landscape (misogyny, Santa Claus, post-sell-by-date rap lingo). I periodically see strange bumper stickers that seem to be the product of loving hands at home in Canada and NC, both places I spend a fair amount of time, and Michigan counts as a point in between: nowadays probably any North American print shop can make you a weird sticker if you are so inspired.
a very public sociologist 11.30.07 at 10:31 pm
Is it just me, or are the right’s attempt at satire always really unfunny?
Down and Out of Sà i Gòn 12.01.07 at 12:48 am
Jennifer Granholm is an alien, by the way. Maybe legal, maybe not, but unquestionably an alien.
That gives me an idea for a nasty, unfunny, stupid, Right-wing (or left-wing) bumper sticker. Simply photoshop her face (and Clinton’s and Pelosi’s too) onto Alien Queens, with a few facehuggers in the process of enveloping the Bush cabinet and interlopers such as Rush Limbaugh.
Underneath it all, place the caption “Ho Ho Ho – Merry Christmas.”
C’mon. Don’t tell me there’s no market for that in America.
Random 12.01.07 at 2:08 am
“you wake up in one of those misogynistic moods that strike us all from time to time”
Yeah, and it’s especially weird when it strikes the 50+% of the populace who are thus hating themselves. Come on, now.
Russell L. Carter 12.01.07 at 4:09 am
Well damn I’d like to know if DP and DD have decided that maybe layin’ down the weapons and doing a bit of reevaluating might be in order.
Tho if you read that card turning in post it’s hard to know where the problem might lie.
Russell
nick s 12.01.07 at 5:56 am
This leads to a bunch of p*ssed-off white men looking for people to blame.
A friend, born and bred in the Detroit metro area and now living in the south, notes that angry white men with pickup trucks in that part of the world have a UAW sticker where the confederate flag would be.
novakant 12.01.07 at 9:41 am
There’s certainly a way in which this piece could be read in which it’s just a bit of pure class snobbery
I don’t know, if that’s supposed to mean that bumper sticker users are lower or lower middle class and that you yourself are middle or upper middle class, it’s a bit irritating that you make such abundant use of the f-word. But then there seems to be a tendency amongst some male English (upper) middle class writers (e.g. Amis, Hitchens) to relish the use of foul-mouthed language. I’ve always found that a bit odd, does it have to do something with proving your manliness?
dsquared 12.01.07 at 1:06 pm
no, I use it as a filter to try and prevent prigs and wowsers from reading any further, to cut down on the amount of pomposity and sermonising I have to deal with in the comments.
theophylact 12.01.07 at 3:30 pm
You can print your own bumper stickers; Office Depot has suitable labels.
novakant 12.01.07 at 10:13 pm
Maybe you do use expletives with such frequency in your regular social contexts, in which case you must be constantly flabbergasted by the fact that the vast majority of people surrounding you are pompous sermonising prigs, since they would find such language inappropriate. I suspect it’s rather a case of the common hypocrisy of playing by the rules in real life, while lashing out on the internet.
dsquared 12.02.07 at 12:57 am
you really don’t know anything about me, novakant, other than the fact that I don’t like you, so why do you persist in addressing me?
PS: soapy tit wank.
Martin 12.02.07 at 5:08 pm
It seems to me there’s a strain of this on the left side of the spectrum too. Certainly in 2004 GWB was the butt of a lot of “humor” that was not a lot better than calling him a doodyhead. I suppose that for the right, it’s the rule; for the left, it takes a disgraceful ass on the order of a Bush or a Cheney to bring it out. (I seem to remember some pretty mean-spirited stuff directed at both Reagan and Bush I too.)
Mike 12.02.07 at 6:48 pm
Suggested Halloween-themed bumper sticker:
Hillary: “When shall we three meet again?” Nancy and Jennifer: “At the Democratic Convention!”
I know, but it’s still funnier than the real one.
Jim Harrison 12.03.07 at 1:01 am
This will be the year in which both the Republicans and the Democrats can use the same bumper sticker: A Vote for the Republicans is a vote for war.
rea 12.03.07 at 3:48 am
Certainly in 2004 GWB was the butt of a lot of “humor†that was not a lot better than calling him a doodyhead.
Well, but he is a doodyhead.
SG 12.03.07 at 9:49 am
novakant, are you British? I didn’t notice a particularly unusually large number of swear words in this post, and I’m Australian. Also two of the three uses of “fuck” were used in describing the putative thought-processes of the redneck sticker-buyer, not dsquared himself. So couldn’t this be taken as a bit of class priggery the other way, with dsquared liking to imagine that those rough rednecks talk that way?
Anyway, I would suggest that for a young British male of any class, using the word “fuck” 3 times in 16 paragraphs (especially in a topic where he was forced to use the word “whore” 3 times) would be considered the height of eloquence. Well done dsquared!
I would further suggest that if he wants to make his work more accessible to the British masses, bless their cotton socks, dsquared is going to have to swear a decided (or even a fucking) lot more than he has been. Get to work dsquared! Or are you some kind of ponce?
cyclist 12.03.07 at 8:50 pm
Recently sold an old car to my neighbor, who wanted it for his daughter going off to college at a (fairly good) east coast university. Some time later, I find her trying to remove my (quite well adhered) Repeal the Patriot Act bumper sticker. In the process of helping her, she asked “just what is the Patriot Act, anyway?”… Sigh. But following my explanation, she did agree that it might be a good thing to repeal.
mcmc 12.04.07 at 2:06 am
Probably the guy has discovered the wonder that is Cafe Press. He’s probably got this witticism on a t-shirt, a mug, and a refrigerator magnet to match.
mcmc 12.04.07 at 2:07 am
Probably
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