Haltom's Eighth Law: No one may be offended; one must take offense

If you are offended, you made yourself offended.


As I recall, my eighth law issued from my fervid brow. It is overstated, so probably it is all mine. The law posits that statements of the form "A offended B" almost always amount to "B took offense at or over A."

Yes! I discovered another passive construction hiding agency. "I am offended ..." soft-pedals my own role in claiming offense.
                 
Although in principle I suppose that some thing(s) might be so inherently offensive as to circumvent cognitive processes, in practice the taking of offense is usually a psychological and/or sociological and an instrumental and/or tactical production. Malediction, for example, need not offend and may even amuse. Cussing is often comedic, odic, epic, or ironic. Some cussing is Homeric. The Ballardite who gave me Haltom's Second and Fourth Laws used to exclaim, "By the testicles of Pericles!" for effect, not for offense.

Yes! I discovered that context matters. Who knew?

Only after one has eliminated alternative interpretations may one justifiably conclude that one has been insulted or assaulted. In Ballard, where most imprecations were little more than devices to intensify or to pace remarks, one might as well parse flatus as ponder curse words. But then, if in Ballard I said, "I find that offensive," I should expect an avalanche of more extreme remarks. Some of those might be intrinsically offensive: "Is it possible that your parents put all their offspring up for adoption and raised the afterbirth?"

Am I seriously maintaining that offensiveness might be relative? Naw! That's radical talk!

At the start of my second year at the university, the all-time Puget Clown asked me whether I had seen a certain fraternity "birding" PLU boosters at the Tacoma Dome during a recent football game. An alum of the University of Washington, I chortled at my cartoonish colleague. "Way worse than that happened every week in Husky Stadium," I offered. The Puget Clown added what he saw as the clincher: "Yes, but my sons were with me." To preserve the offense that he wanted to take, my colleague effortlessly transmogrified drunken frat boys into corrupters of youth. He thereby converted youthful enthusiasm into intrinsically offensive behavior by pointing out that his sons might have been coarsened or traumatized by witnessing such a disgusting display.

Deft deployment of high dudgeon. "Think of the children!" Good cover, weenie.

I certainly hope that he does not recognize himself else he will take offense when I exclaim, "What a fop!" An Ivy League bozo would not be dealt with so leniently in Ballard, where the impertinent question would be "And what did the sire of your sons think about the matter, you sackless wuss?"

Sometimes, Ballardites also get personal.

If to establish offense we infer intent, we often err. If I take a remark to be an insult, I not only risk being seen as humorless and haughty but also give away my sensitivity to certain gibes. The less humor and the more sensitivity I display, the more I advantage "the offender" and exaggerate "the offense" in the eyes of observers. Observers may then regard me as a fop or a wuss or, worse, a sackless wuss.

You'd never guess that I hail from Ballard.

One does not have to be Sigmund Freud [or, in the case of the average Ballardite, be able to spell Froyd's name] to imagine why a person opts to take offense rather than to slough off badinage. If an insult strikes most who know you as wildly off the mark, they will defend you, and you may shake off the insult as sophomoric or soporific or you may embrace it and thereby accentuate its absurdity. If, in contrast, you shift into high dudgeon, you open yourself to "Truth hurts!" or other dazzling ripostes and make friends and colleagues wonder what makes you so thin-skinned.

In addition, Ballardites might wonder if you ever had a scrotum.

The Puget Clown about whom I wrote above frequently insulted junior faculty, especially junior-faculty women. Many colleagues thought him a misogynist. Perhaps he was, although that would scarcely differentiate him from many faculty, male or female. I thought it more likely that he was attempting to be "one of the guys" and was flirting as best he could. He insulted female colleagues because most of them did not wear braids that he could dip in ink wells. The Puget Clown longed to be mistaken for an "alpha male" and thought that churlish insults and catty remarks would advance that mission. When most women dismissed his cattiness and most men thought it unmanly, The Puget Clown got his due. When people took his remarks at all seriously, by contrast, he got to play the wag by assuring the vulnerable colleague that it was all in fun. It often was in fun until the target was denied tenure or reappointment.

You guessed it! The Puget Sound Clowns perpetrated truly offensive injustices while taking offense at trivialities.

Taking offense is much less effective than dismissing remarks as senseless or counterproductive. The latter options cope with sexist, racist, or other inappropriate remarks more effectively than umbrage because a puzzled look or a poker face deprives the would-have-been offender of offense. Ask the bounder to explain his jest, then shake your head and mutter, "I am sure you had some reason to say that." If you hear a discouraging word, simply chuckle, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Non Sequitur Theater."

You can guess to which orifice such remarks tended to be attributed in Ballard.

The Puget Clown I wrote about above objected to the frat boys' digits as part of an "argument" for delaying rush from August to January. That made no sense. Rather than wrestle with this colleague over whether students were or should be free to assail pigskin opponents, I wondered at the cogency of the sackless wuss's argument. Unless he was pointing out that the faculty were set to perpetrate one obscenity -- regulating when members of a club might seek new members -- on the excuse of the other obscenity -- those fraternity fingers -- his juxtaposition made little sense. I subsequently learned that this faculty member abhorred any student, staff, or faculty entity that he could not order about as he pleased. If I had known that in 1987, I might have interrupted his self-parody. At the time, I thought it as likely that this colleague would gain an important post at the University of Puget Clowns as that Dick Cheney would shoot a rich guy in the face.

A Ballardite would note that his wasn't a very handsome face anyway. Every Ballardite would know how Cheney could mostly miss with a shotgun from a few feet away. "After the third akvavit, I am lucky to piss in the pot I am sitting atop!"

One should husband offense lest one litter one's life with trivial annoyances. Every sapient life-form in modern America finds pretexts for indignation multiple times per hour. Broadcast commercials, liars in high offices, and the vicissitudes of living in the Post-Literate Era, for examples, annoy me. I reserve my being offended for rationalizations of genocide, for practiced stupidities that starve or doom human beings, and for other momentous matters.

Indeed, the same Puget Clown from above abetted the sins of the Professional Standards Cult in 2003-2004 and various inequities worked by the Faculty Advancement Committee year after year. Most offenses were too banal to waste much energy on. Rather than to take offense at power committees, I went on offense. I tried to make the Clown and the committees on which he served account for their actions. The Clown extruded half-truths, tall tales, and Clintonian distinctions; the committees were less persuasive. The Clown and the power committees have provided me ample material for parody, mockery, or burlesque.

Indeed, The Puget Clown and the power committees are the founders of this blog!

A few faculty who dare to learn what has transpired in their name appreciate the inanities chronicled on "Rump Parliament." By contrast, most faculty, uncertain what the PSC did or does, confused about what the Faculty Code might say or mean, but certain that no power committee will assail them if only they maintain their ignorance and deference, strive mightily to maintain their neutrality and their ignorance.

In sum, if you want to play the victim [especially while decrying the tendency of Americans to play the victim] then go ahead and take offense. But be honest with yourself if with no one else. No one need have offended you. You chose to be offended. In Ballard that makes you a common cockbite.

No offense intended.


Coming Soon -- Haltom's Ninth Law: Age quod agis

Haltom's Second Law: It doesn’t mean nothing.

Most things are not meaningless but are not what they seem, advantageous as it might be to induce one to leap to obvious but misleading conclusions.


My second law, borrowed from a disabled Ballard Vietnam vet who mumbled, "Don't mean nuthin' " every day, exploits a double negative. That double negative permits the usual, idiomatic interpretation – the second negative is a colloquial intensification of the first – without necessarily foregoing the literal interpretation – most expressions or actions bear or convey meaning. To preserve that useful ambiguity, I adopted the veteran's mumble as a law second in importance only to "F**k it/you/me/them/this/it all."

Let's listen to a lyric from Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" as I propound.

… [M]an standin' o’er a dead dog by the highway in a ditch.
He's lookin' down kinda puzzled, pokin' that dog with a stick.
Got his car door flung open; standin' out on Highway 31.
Like if he stood there long enough that dog get up and run.
Struck me kinda funny, seemed kinda funny sir to me.
Still, at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe

Taken literally, “It doesn't mean nothing” reminds us of the tendency of homo sapiens to imbue myths [e.g., mission statements] and rituals [reaccreditation] with significance. Suspended in our own imaginings, we manufacture meaning whether we find meanings to be as obvious and intrinsic as a curse or as subtle and elusive as a Rorschach blot. Except zero and "the null set," no expression means nothing. But meanings assigned need have nothing to do with any referents or content. We make even nonsense meaningful. Take this blog, for example.

Now Mary Lou loved Johnny with a love mean and true.
She said, "Baby, work for you every day and bring my money home to you."
One day he up and left her and ever since that
She waits down at the end of that dirt road for young Johnny to come back.
Struck me kinda funny, seemed kind of funny sir to me.
How at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.

The idiomatic interpretation – "nothing" is an emphatic alternative to "anything" – is consistent with the literal interpretation to the extent that one denies this or that meaning but not all meaning. The idiom is slang for “This thing does not have the import or implications that you are assigning it.” Some evident meaning(s) attached to events or expressions must be questioned or vitiated before they settle into intractable truths. When a dean says that some concerned faculty member does not understand “the other side,” the faculty member must realize the high probability that the alleged other side is inconsequent. The other side need not mean nothing, but the dean may be exaggerating or distracting. Sometimes, faculty detect vacuous misdirection, as when faculty derided assurances that administrators and committees had "addressed" faculty plagiarism. Even those assurances, however, did not mean nothing. Rather, they betokened that cover-up artists had no better forensic options. Out of ammo, administrators directed attention elsewhere. For once, it did not avail them.

Take a baby to the river; Kyle William they call him.
Wash the baby in the water; take away little Kyle's sin.
In a whitewash shotgun shack, an old man passes away.
Take his body to the graveyard and over him they pray,
“ Lord, won't you tell us, tell us what does it mean.”
Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.

So what is the profit in Haltom’s Second Law? If a colleague marshals some symbol, verity, cliché, or canard and the colleague is not sincerely deluded, the obvious meaning is there to make respectable or to obscure the ulterior meaning(s). Seek the ulterior meanings. If a cigar sometimes is just a cigar, nothing is lost by presuming that it might be something else. When apologists invoke "multiple narratives," one may find oneself awash in the Rashomon effect. Before one howls like Benjy going around the town circle in an unaccustomed way at the end of The Sound and the Fury, one should politely inquire what the content of the alternative narrative might be. When apologists then raise confidentiality or some other dodge to excuse their unwillingness to present their excuses for scrutiny, then howl. Just don't howl "F**k this!" and leave the room. That would be uncivil expression although utter bullshit is not.

Congregation gathers down by the riverside.
Preacher stands with his Bible; groom stands waitin' for his bride.
Congregation gone, the sun sets behind a weepin' willow tree.
Groom stands alone and watches the river rush on so effortlessly,
Wonderin' where can his baby be.
Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.

My second law, as formulated in high school, was, "It's all bullshit anyway." However, that law was disproved repeatedly over the last decades. Some of "it" – say, the modal use in the Faculty Senate of "multiple narratives" – does not rise to the level of bullshit. Even bullshit or sub-bullshit may disclose truths, so many pronouncements are bullshit useful not only to the bluffer but to everyone present who knows a tell when she or he sees one. When the Ballard vet suggested a superior formulation, I adopted it. I certainly hope no committee addresses my plagiarism. How harrowing!


Coming Soon: Haltom's Third Law! "No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any."