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.
