HIJACKED! or You're STILL Wrong Mykel's Sept. 2022 Blog

  

HIJACKED!

or You're STILL Wrong,

Mykel's September 2022 Blog

by Mykel Board

One of the greatest tragedies in mankind’s entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion. --Arthur C. Clark

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.' – Richard Dawkins

The world is beset by many problems, but in my opinion, this hijacking of our brain's reward centers by electronic media is potentially one of the most destructive. -- Andrew Weil

...

I lay naked on the hard wood table… wrists and ankles roped and tied to its legs. Next to the table, standing unbound, is a very unattractive woman. Surrounded by several young men in army camouflage. The woman is white… bad teeth… most body hair I’ve ever seen on a woman… monobrow, with a masculine branching hairline from pubes to pupik. Her face looks like a mass of plastic surgery gone wrong. Skin stretched Joker-face like on the mouth, neck and cheeks. Her nose bears tiny scars up and down both sides… more than a normal nosejob... like it had been completely detached and then sewn back on.

This is the woman who now reaches between my legs, grabs my limpness, and rubs it back and forth between her thumb and index finger. Then, she leans over me and flips my flaccidity with her tongue. Then she sucks it in using her tongue to push it against the roof of her mouth.

“Wass gonggngng konger?” I ask.

One of the men walks up and loosens the gag around mouth.

“Could you repeat that?” He asks.

I try to talk around the loose piece of leather – now less taut– in my mouth.

“What’s going on?” I ask. “Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?”

“We’re from Grenomia,” says the man. “This is our queen. She was deposed in a CIA sponsored coup. She’s in hiding now. She needs more than food and housing. She needs pleasure. That’s why we’re hijacking your dick.”

That’s what I want to talk about… Hijacking. Not dick hijacking, but language hijacking. The quote at the start of this blog is from famous atheist Richard Dawkins. He remarks on the first case of language hijacking I’m aware of.

In 1957, Leonard Bernstein wrote a song for Maria, a character in West Side Story. “I feel pretty. Oh, so pretty. So pretty and witty and gay…”

In 1957 the word GAY meant happy or carefree. Fast forward to 1988… Etymology class at NYU: today’s topic: language change, Professor John Costello.

“In Middle English, the word pratie, meant cunning, crafty or sly. When it evolved to the word pretty, the meaning slowly changed to “very.” We can still see the old meaning very in expressions like “pretty good.” The more recent meaning “nice looking,” came about a hundred years later. The meaning sly, or cunning has been completely lost.”

^♫ I feel pretty. Oh so pretty. So pretty and witty and gay…^♫ I sing from my seat almost exactly in the middle of the classroom.

Prof. Costello laughs.

“Yeah, there’s another one,” he says, “much more recent. Up until the 1960s “gay” only meant happy. Now it means homosexual, and I expect it won’t be long before the original meaning is completely lost.

In my 1980s mind, I love that homosexuals have hijacked GAY. It counters the desperate, depressed, sad, sick image of homosexuals of the previous decades. And gay girls too! Wow! That’s something I’d like to see.

That joy has since died… along with the wonderful word GAY… now reduced to a G in an ever-growing alphabet of letters standing for things most people don’t have a clue about. LGBTQIAFKU….

Homosexuals seem to be the masters of linguistic hijacking. After taking (and losing) GAY, they’ve managed to hijack the rainbow. Who could imagine? Such a beautiful sign, the color of all light, but wear it on a shirt or handkerchief… or anything these days and watch how quick you’re ejected from the nearest country and western bar.

But banks, department stores, and cereal companies show rainbow flags. THE BOYS TV show has a parody with PRIDE (rainbow logo) toothpaste and rainbow PRIDE candy bars. I wonder how long the parody will remain a parody. THE NATION, one of my favorite publications ran this story in June.

Short linguistic aside: English has borrowed the word futon from Japanese. In Japanese, the word means a soft, thin, foldable surface, something between a thick quilt and a yoga mat. In English it means a thick mattress that has no springs. Similarly, the Japanese have borrowed the English word claim, but use it where we would use complain.

There’s a difference, however, between borrowing a word and hijacking it. The word FILE was borrowed from a metal cabinet with sliding doors and manila folders inside. It was borrowed for computer use, meaning a self-contained unit on a computer. This didn’t stop people using it with the metal drawers. Likewise, the Japanese claim, and the English futon, do not prevent the original speakers from using it in the original way.

On the other hand, take WOKE. A word that had the meaning of awake… and expanded to mean “aware in general”… but more specifically about racial and political ideas. It was a useful word, especially when commenting on someone who suddenly understands something new.

Take me! I have a WOKE moment when I hear the story of how Miles Davis was stopped by the cops when he was driving his Lamborghini down the highway.

“I stopped you because you didn’t fit the car,” the cops told him.

BOING!

That could never happen to me. Suddenly I’m aware that people are not snowflakes… each as different from the other as one snowflake is from another. There is really a black experience, and it’s something I can never know unless someone tells me. Of course, things are different for each person, but race, age, national groups have a common experience that you can only hear about and never experience for yourself. I’m suddenly WOKE.

One of my Japanese students tells me that a guy in Penn Station threw a can of soda at her, shouting “Go back to China, Typhoid Mary!” That would never happen to me, but could happen to several others among my friends or anyone else who looks Oriental.

WOKE was the idea of sudden awareness, and it was a great concept… until it was hijacked. I guess someone on the right realized that Politically Correct was old fashioned… even the president didn’t use it anymore. So okay, they’ll use WOKE with the same meaning as Politically Correct (a term which, itself, was hijacked from lefties who originally used it to refer to other lefties who strictly followed the Old Marxist line).

Now, the definition according to the Urban Dictionary is:

Just as in 2022, no one would ever seriously say I’m Politically Correct no one will claim they’re woke. Another useful… even joyous term… like GAY used to be... is gone to the scrapheap.

Even Johnny Rotten is getting on the hijack bus. In a UK Times interview about American politics, Rotten said “You have a Democrat party that doesn’t respect anything but the latest woke fashion trend and that’s to the destruction of America.”

Nothing like woke fashion to destroy a country, right?

But wait! There’s more!

Another one of my favorites… hijacked by the Politic… er… woke folks... is the word HATE! I’ve seen more hate at a Red Sox-Yankees game than I have at a Klan march. Carrying a tiki-torch is supposed to be hate. But antifa slugging some defenseless guy on the street isn’t. That’s HATE hijacked.

Hate is my feeling toward broccoli or toward my prostate at 4AM. Hate is not the spray-painting of a twisted cross on a synagogue wall. The former is a feeling of anger and the urge to destroy. The latter is a teenage prank not much different than students drawing a sex-filled caricature of their teacher on the whiteboard when her back is turned.

Worse, of course, is that the feeling, usually expressed in nothing more than an epithet… no worse than FUCK YOU... will legally turn graffiti into a felony. In the case of a Queens synagogue, it has.

I gotta admit though, sometimes I wish I could hijack some words. SHEEPLE, for example, is just a great word. It expresses, in seven letters, a litany of conformity, unreasoning fear, unthinking following. It could be so useful in describing so many people.

But look what happened. The conspiracists, the right-wing loonies, have taken the word and destroyed it. Check out the Urban Dictionary on what it’s become.

Much of this hijacking is done on facebook… could be twitter too… I’m not there very often. Social networks are the wrist straps and ankle straps holding me down while some ugly girl hijacks my penis.

I say Trump did a good thing keeping us out of war… and I’m a TRUMPIST. I don’t condemn someone who makes a Jewish nose joke, I’m a Nazi.

Then there are the co-opters. The capitalist absorbers who can take anything and turn it into a commodity. That homosexual who stopped being “gay” because the idea was hijacked by corporate America was only the foreskin of the corporate penis. Punkrock in TV commercials. Interracial couples selling bedsheets. Two young men bonding over breakfast cereal. All hijacked and used to SELL.

LIBERTARIAN, once a kind of anarchist who believed in maximum civil liberties and individual rights. Now it’s become a word to mean rule by wealth. Even POPULIST, once a noble term describing politicos who disdain the moneyed and put PEOPLE first, now describes politicians who are racist, egocentric, and pandering.

Well, this here socialist libertarian populist will continue his fight against the sheeple. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever be a market segment. What the fuck are they going to sell me? And sorry, my dick belongs to me. You can borrow it, but you can’t hijack it.

See you in hell.

Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

→ Unforeseen coincidence, dept: This from THE WEEK magazine. Seems like gayitude hijacked not only the rainbow… but anything that looks like a rainbow:

→ It’s a respectable job dept: Fox News reports that a Houston mother turned to Child Protective Services for help with her 14-year-old daughter, who had been running away and getting into trouble at school. Her daughter told her that a "worker had been telling her she should become a prostitute." The girl videoed the CPS staff member. Mom filed an official complaint, with the commissioner in Texas. The worker was dismissed.

→ Speaking of dicks dept: The World News Daily tells us that FBI agents made an astonishing discovery while executing a search warrant at the residence of a Houston mortician: 3,178 embalmed human penises. It seems the organs were cut off of the corpses and kept for later transplant sales. I think they should have been made into punk jewelry. Can’t you just see this New Wave girl with one hanging from her earlobe?

See you in hell, redux,

MB

NEW THIS MONTH

I’m a long-time subscriber to the The Nation. It’s the only lefty publication that I find myself not only agreeing with, but also finding inspiration from. There are two articles in the current issue I’d like to recommend herel Strangely, when I post this stuff on facebook, no one looks at it. My “friends” would just rather call me a “Trumpist” or a “Republican” for all the times I don’t follow the party line.

One article is an editorial about how the Democrats are becoming the party of the Upper Middle Class, while the Republicans pick up the workers.. The other is about that dumb January 6^th show trial and how it does nothing in real time, except boost Donny Trump’s voter base. Both articles are highly recommended.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both.

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com