Here’s another example of the stupid calling out the equally-stupid:
Bette Midler faced an angry backlash last night after ridiculing Melania Trump’s accent and calling her an ‘illegal alien’ while the first lady spoke at the Republican National Convention. The award-winning performer, 74, launched a tirade against Melania on Twitter in which she said: ‘Oh, God. She still can’t speak English.’
Midler was immediately branded a ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobe’ by critics including Piers Morgan, and accused of ‘dunking on an immigrant’ who became a US citizen after emigrating from Slovenia in the 1990s.
When faux outrage is uttered, can Piers Morgan be far behind? Let’s attack this quantum stupidity on all fronts, starting with the woman who got her start singing in the Turkish baths of New York.
Dear Bette: after you reach a certain age, your vocal cords stiffen, becoming less and less able to speak in different tongues, so to speak, without retaining your original accent. (The cut-off age seems to be about age 18 or so.) That’s why it’s best to teach young children a foreign language as early as possible rather than attempting to do so as adults. After nearly a quarter-century of living in the United States, for example, my own accent is irretrievably that of my native Johannesburg — for the simple reason that I was in my early 30s when I embarked on the Great Wetback Episode and my vocal cords were as stiff as boards by then. I can imitate the occasional Joyzee or Texan phrase, but not carry on an entire conversation in the patois without sounding like an idiot. (When speaking Afrikaans, however, my accent is perfect — no South African can tell if I’m Afrikaans or “English” — simply because from birth I grew up speaking both English and Afrikaans.) So if the First Lady — who emigrated Over Here in her 20s — still has much of her native Slovenian accent, that’s why. It’s not stupidity, Bette, and certainly nowhere near the level of yours.
Let’s move on to Our Piers and his ilk. If I make fun of an Irish or Scottish accent, or (to be even less microscopic) a French or German one — which I frequently do — how can it possibly be “rayciss” when all members of the above, including myself, are of the same (sorta-Aryan) race? It’s a simple matter of confusing “race” with “ethnicity”, unless we’re going back to the time when talking about the Irish or Spanish “races” when meaning ethnicity. The problem for these dweebs is that there’s no pejorative term for ethnic mockery or chauvinism, so they have to get sloppy and use the “eeeeevil rayciss” epithet. It’s not only imprecise but incorrect; but I don’t expect morons like Morgan to understand that.
And finally: making fun of other people’s accents is about 50% of all humor, and maybe still more in my case. I mock, with equal frequency and ferocity, the various accents which make up these United States and Europe — whether Joyzee, Texan, Frog, Kraut, whatever — and that’s all fair game and funny; but as soon as I be makin’ fun of Ebonics, nigger, or mock an actual African expression like “Aiiiisssshhhh, yehbo Bra!” that’s suddenly OMG Beyond The Pale [sic] ?
Fuck that for a tale. All these Wokesters and scolds can kiss my lily-white African-American ass.
Afterthought, for Bette Midler: Melania Trump speaks five languages, while you speak only one, stupidly.
I am always amused by the way natives from the subcontinent use the English language and thank them for it.
I remember from over forty years ago when an Indian co-worker wanted to pay me a compliment and to show his sincerity, started by saying “Now Larry, I am not putting butter on you . . .”
The mere mention of Betty Midler brings to my mind the adage about lipstick on a pig.
Or teaching pigs to sing.
a)
I’m still deciding which rendition of ‘The Rose’ song I prefer — Conway Twitty or Midler.
I’m leaning toward the ‘not New York city’ version.
b)
At the time, I was shaken to my gut by the systemic racism displayed by the ‘Hanz and Franz’ bodybuilders skit on Saturday Night Live.
I understand that televisionprogramming came from New York city.
c)
I read someplace New York city has <eight percent of workers reporting to their jobs.
Driving videos show miles of boarded-up businesses covered with vandalism, while thousands of goofballs stagger about with zero sense of civic involvement.
Mz. Midler can have New York city.
I find accents to be, well charming or fascinating really. I usually like to guess where someone may be from, whether it is a different region of the US or somewhere in the world. There was one movie I watched, the title of which I forget, with various characters from Scotland, Ireland, Cockney and other parts of old Blighty, and even though all spoke English, subtitles were required.
My French has received both praise and scorn when I was in France, but that may be expected with the French. Or the difference may be be the reception from country versus city people. I always try to speak as well as I can, plus I observe the local customs of courtesy and respect. Sadly, many traveling Americans are ignorant of how to conduct themselves.
Though as Mark Twain is said to have said, I think about the French: “I’ll be damned if I could get them to understand their own language”
When I watched ‘The Full Monty’ with my girlfriend, I had to put the subtitles on for her.
So Bette dumped on someone because of their national origin? How very Democrat of her.
Perhaps Melania should sue her ass down to Parade Rest.
Oh, and Bette, if you speak five languages, you’re going to have an accent in at least one of them.
OMG Kim! You used the ‘N’ word.. now you are in for it..
wait.. you’re an African American.. never mind..
Yeah, I’m playing the African-American card. Why not? I’m more African AND more American than most people of the Pantifa/BLM persuasion…
Now wait just a minute here! Kim is an African American and he’s not black. Not even a little bit black.
Clearly he is appropriating someones ethnicity. That’s RAAACIST!!!
You say he emigrated from south Africa, so he’s African American? He abandoned his homeland AND claims to be African American. That’s EXZENOFOBIC and clearly he hates everyone. Well, he’s a conservative so naturally he’s a HATER (HATE ER). He probably hates females too, so he’s a MISSAWGINIST pig.
Now you are claiming that Kim the Hating, exzenofobic missawginist pig, raaacist is not gonna vote for Joe, the savior of our world? By Allah, he’s now added Pyonction (pee yong shin, a Korean word meaning stupid to the point of being crippled.) to his CV.
The above is BLM, Antifa, DNC, CPUSA, etc dogma.
God help us if that senile rectal individual wins in November. The GIN was added in misogynist to motivate folks to donate some GOOD gin to Kim’s hydration.
True story about the accent of natives of the subcontinent:
Many years ago I was an engineering grad student and therefore had several good friends who were from India. One day as I was talking with one of my Indian friends, my girlfriend and her little sister approached us. The little sister still lived with her family hundreds of miles from campus and was just visiting for the weekend. It was the first time we had met.
One of the things the family had asked her to do during the visit was to take a good look at this boyfriend (me) and report back. Ph.D. candidates in engineering are rare birds and the family wanted to know what I was really like from a less prejudiced source than the girlfriend.
Turns out that discussion with the Indian friend was a key to her evaluation. She heard him speak to me and me reply to him. She was blown away that I would know his obscure native tongue well enough to understand him, even though I obviously couldn’t speak it very well because I replied in English.
Yes, we were both speaking English, but she couldn’t understand a single word my friend spoke.
The that fall she entered college as a math major and had ample opportunity to learn to understand that very same “obscure native tongue” as spoken by a few of her professors.
I used to work as a supervisor in an IT call center on the overnight shift, so we had Indians (and Chinese, Filipino, etc) calling us, rather than the reverse.
One of my employees came to me after he got off a call and asked if I could make the recording of his most recent call “go away.” The caller was from India, speaking English and my employee could understand him, but the Indian fellow couldn’t understand our “non-Indian” accent. After a couple of minutes of going round and round, my employee began imitating an Indian accent, and suddenly the client in India could understand him and they were able to proceed with the call and resolve the client’s issue.
My employee was worried that he’d be branded a racist and fired for doing so, which was why he was asking if I could make that call disappear…
It was also while working there there I learned the lovely phrase “please do the needful” and that Dikshit is an honest-to-God surname there, even if it’s more usually transliterated as Dixit.
She’d never say that about Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. Or Ingrid Bergman or Max von Sydow, for that matter.
Because she’s an idiot AND a hypocrite.