The Art of Insult

You fight like a dairy-farmer.

I always used to get into trouble with people because I say a lot of things I don't mean. Or, rather, I mean them, but other people don't understand what I mean and think I mean something else, which amounts to the same thing from their frame of reference. It doesn't help that much of what I used to say that they didn't understand sounded like insults. Sometimes they weren't--sometimes they were true statements that I actually meant as compliments but due to disparities in ethical philosophies were considered insults by them--but that's not what I want to talk about, because those are easy to explain. I think this a is right, they think a is wrong, I tell them they're a and they flip out. Mathematics.

While I'm using the past tense throughout, of course, none of this is really gone, though it doesn't happen as often as it used to.

Anyway. The other cases, when they were insults, or sort-of, or whatever, are more interesting, because they're more complicated. I learned early on that words were words and that's all they were; that is, an insult was a sound out of someone's mouth and nothing more unless you made it more. ("Sticks and stones can break my bones / but words will never hurt me" was my motto back in the day. Not that I was a particularly bullied child, because I was actually a fairly sociable child in my younger years and anyway most would-be bullies learned quickly that I was quite willing to apply that mantra to the offensive as well as the defensive.) Since then I've always had a strange relationship with language: a fascination, to be sure (I'm an English major, after all), but also a detachment, an awareness of how fragile language is, how easily it can be broken and tossed aside, all its illusory control and power dispersed in a flash, like a flame consuming a cloud of gas.

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

So insults never meant much to me. Coupled with later social isolation, some serious depression, and a penchant for linguistic experimentation, I spent a lot of time insulting people. And I became rather skilled at it. Verbal sparring, I thought of it as: play. Fun. Games. There were rare cases where I became genuinely angry and I went for the jugular; and there was always an underlying bitterness to it; but mostly, with my detachment from language and my growing detachment from the world at large, the insults I shot forth didn't mean anything to me. They were just empty noise ("animals howling in the night because it's better than silence": one of the few good things to come out of Torchwood, that speech).

Other people, of course, did not find my words so meaningless. Things did not go well. I should have learned--and I did learn, sort-of. It's just that I was an asshole, I was depressed, and I didn't give a damn. If I was hurting people with my fun, so be it. All the better, even. But that's not what I want to talk about, because a bitter teenager bitterly stabbing other people with verbal knives is not interesting.

I once owned a dog that was smarter than you.

There's a wierd phenomenon regarding insults within social groups. Take something that doesn't matter, that has no actual relevance to the interaction of the individuals within the social group, some random thing that's not money or grades or girls or whatever the currency of value is within a particular group. And turn it into a war zone. Whenever individuals have issues with each other, when somebody just gets fucking pissed to hell off at somebody else in the group, don't talk about the issue that caused it, the issue that might cause actual, meaningful confrontation, that might result in real consequences. Instead, make an argument about the random thing that nobody really cares about but that, because it's understood that this is the way it works, becomes a thing that everyone is suddenly ready to defend to the death, in a strange, fucked-up, post-ironic way.

That's how I work with everyone I know. Because the truth there's always something rubbing me the wrong way. I'm never really comfortable. Taking issue with people is what I do. I spent so many long years hating everyone that at this point, no matter what I may say or think in my head, it's subconscious and instinctual to analyze and critique and judge. I don't believe in judgment, really; I don't even really believe in right and wrong; but most of the time I can't accept people as people, as much as I want to, because that's goddamned fucking hard and it's a lot easier to see people as representations of values and structures and symbols and order and whatever bullshit our psychology constructs to hide reality. And so I take meaningless things and tear people up about them. "The violence of action": it's just something to do. Play. Fun. Games.

He must have taught you everything you know.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, exactly. It's just--there something very wierd about the way this works. Perhaps wrong, perhaps fucked-up, perhaps just a coping mechanism for reality we can't face. But to tear people down, meaninglessly? Well, tearing people down is always meaningless. All insults are meaningless, because all words are meaningless; anytime you feel insulted, it's because you chose to be insulted, because you chose to feel badly about yourself, not because so-and-so said whatever. Words are words and nothing more, they're just sound in the air, particles vibrating. So what does it mean to reduce it, to take an illusory but validated construct and invalidate it, to make it illusory on another, more-acceptable level? Does it mean that we do understand the illusory nature of the first construct, as much as we act otherwise, but just can't face it? Coping mechanism.

That's the opposite of the mechanics I mentioned earlier--the meaningless, second-tier insults are to avoid dealing meaningful, first-tier insults. But I've found that those kind of parallels, apparent contradictions, paradoxes, whatever, are just--not signs of reality, signs of nothing, in fact, because that's how things are, everywhere, always. Look closely enough and something and you find its opposite starting back at you, because they are one and the same. Follow a line long enough and you end up at the opposite end, back where you started, because the geometry of the universe is closed.

You make me want to puke.

I'm reminded of a comment on PR-Otaku, a site annotating William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, one of my favorite novels, discussing a mention of Hello Kitty within Pattern Recognition:

The reason why Cayce doesn’t toss her cookies when faced with a wall o’ Kitty is simple: It’s “purest no-content marketing.”

I own an Hello Kitty key fob. It’s an excellent piece, and I’m running it into the ground. I required an East German with an Italian name at a leather bar to fix it one night. I am shopping for a replacement. But my loyalties have shifted. I have always preferred Bad Badtz-Maru. There is certainly no reason to do that, apart from girliness. It’s no-content marketing: Neither is better. Except I know I’m a Bad Badtz-Maru person at root and not, despite the incriminating evidence of my key fob, an Hello Kitty person. (I also very much enjoy my overengineered Bad Badtz-Maru mechanical-pencil set, a gift actually from Japan.)

I react rather like Cayce. Since there is no reason to prefer one over the other (it’s all kawai, though naturally I do also adore the absurd German-Polish-Japlish name “Bad Badtz-Maru”), rabidly preferring one over the other is OK. Meaningless rabid obsessions are.

That's what I'm talking about. No-content, meaningless, rabid obesessions. Viciously insulting people over nothing. I've been watching Generation Kill and the amount of homophobic and racist comments that get thrown around is staggering; but I understand, because soldiers are in like the tensest situation on the planet (besides perhaps the civilians stuck in the middle of their wars), and so they need that kind of meaningless outlet for aggression. But normal people? Normal people, living normal lives, without other people constantly shooting at them and other people constantly screaming at them and other people depending on them to save their lives? I don't feel like we have an excuse to act like this. Which is bullshit, because nobody needs an excuse to do anything, we just do things and that's that, but there's still something very, very whacked about it to me. I do it all the time. I don't get it. It frightens me.

You make me think someone already did.