by Mike Bendzela
“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined. . . . I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.” (Civil Disobedience)
An experience I had years ago serves as a dispassionate preamble for how acolytes of certain movements can use labels to define you and/or hoodwink you into swallowing a point of view you may not yourself share. I was investigating the phenomenon of homeopathy, the treatment for various maladies that involves successive dilutions of an active substance hundreds of times over with water (or alcohol) until the final tincture contains not a single molecule of the substance left. This, paradoxically (and allegedly), enhances the substance’s power to cure the malady, thus turning Paracelsus’s dictum on its head: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” * The same principle goes for cures: The dose makes the cure, beyond which it becomes a poison. According to homeopathic ideology, it is the dilution, not the dose, of a substance that makes the cure. And, oh, by the way — these “active” substances are chosen according to their propensity to provoke the actual symptoms being treated. In other words, it works on the principle “similia similibus curantur”, like cures like. But the “like” entity has been diluted entirely out of the mixture! Because red onions make your nose run and your eyes water (both symptoms of a cold), you can use the diluted juice of red onions to treat colds and allegies. I shit you not.* Homeopaths would say the dilution and “succussion” (vigorous shaking) of the red onion mixture “potentates” it. Quelle hair of the dog! Find the dog that bit you, and instead of taking one of its hairs to use in a treatment, shave the dog bald, slap it silly, and call me in the morning.
I was interested in learning what homeopathy was because homeopathic treatments for livestock are allowed in organic practice, but antibiotics are not allowed. What was it about homeopathy that made it preferrable to traditional, tested antibiotic treatments for disease in animals? Well, it’s natural, for one thing. It’s also perfectly harmless . . . because there is literally nothing to it except water drops on a sugar pill. So, I was reading a discussion in which a veterinary doctor was arguing strenuously with an advocate of organics for appropriate antibiotics use where indicated, and she insisted this not be called “allopathic medicine.” And what is that? Allopathic medicine is that medicine which is not homeopathic medicine. So, what was this veterinarian’s problem? She obviously discounted homeopathy, even loathed it, so why wouldn’t she embrace the term “allopathic”?
It turns out “allopathy” was coined originally as a term of abuse by the inventor of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, an 18th century German physician. He was understandably appalled by some of the standard treatments of the time, such as bloodletting to solve “an imbalance of the four humours.”* Hahnemann thought homeopathy was treating the underlying causes of illness instead of trying to beat illness into submission through what he called allopathy, treatments that have opposite effects to symptoms. Unfortunately, Hahnemann’s answer to the prevailing quackery was just more quackery, but who can blame an 18th century physician for not knowing what he didn’t know?
The veterinarian insisted that her practice was simply veterinary medicine and that the pejorative term allopathy be repudiated because it was bullshit. She resented having her medical practice framed by a quack, and I could see her point.
Which brings me (finally) to my own point: Of bullshit labels at once purge thyself.
Conventional Farmer
This one is all but irrelevant for me now, as our little Community Supported Agriculture farm closed years ago, but I remark on it because so many farmers have swallowed this framing, hook, line, sinker, fisher, and fishing boat. It’s common practice to refer to non-organically certified farmers as conventional farmers, and what of it? Like the veterinarian above, farmers are being invited to see their practice as framed by the opposition, in this case organic farmers: “Conventional means those of you who are not one of us.” Organic farming is so systematized as to be a veritable Leviticus of “allowed” and “prohibited” practices and substances, but there is no Book of Conventional for all those other farmers to follow: They just do what they do and strive to work within existing agricultural laws. In other words, conventional farming is not even a thing apart from being non-organically certified.
There is nothing particularly wrong with organic farming, in the way that homeopathy is just wrong (that is, not supported by modern medical theory and evidence). My three years working at an organic farm showed me they just do things a little differently, according to a raft of standards and guidelines that just stopped making sense to me after a while. It seems so much ado over “best practices” signifying next to nothing. From the ecological perspective, all farming is unsustainable: It takes over land, grows populations, and depletes finite resources. All farming. Period. It doesn’t matter whether you’re fertilizing with synthetic 10-10-10 NPK fertilizer or blood meal, rock phosphate, and greensand. It doesn’t matter whether you’re spraying carbaryl and captan on apple trees or kaolin clay and sulfur; whether you weed with a hoe, a tractor and cultivator, or an herbicide. Organic and “conventional” farming involve co-opting land, turning it over (if you’re working at scale and not merely gardening), laying irrigation line, building and powering greenhouses, stockpiling the appropriate fertilizers and pesticides, fueling tractors and equipment, and employing plastics from the top to the bottom of your enterprise.
The problem with organics is just that it’s an ideology, even something of a cult, albeit a pretty harmless one. The farm I started with my partner and landlords fifteen years ago differed little from the organic farm where I worked for three summers before: Small acreage, same or similar crops, small clientele. If anything, our farm was of a more rustic dimension, smaller, lower-key, even primitive: It didn’t make sense to invest in some of the equipment the organic farm had, as we were a mere two acres (orchard and garden) instead of eight (which for many commercial farmers is a distinction without a difference!). Thankfully, we did not have to endure the rigamarole of buying expensive “approved” or “certified” materials that then had to be rigidly documented in ledgers for organics inspectors to peruse. My pesticides applicator’s license meant I had to abide by state laws and document orchard sprays, which was enough for me to deal with. And, by the way — as an employee at the organic farm, I still had to be trained in the application of pesticides, because, yes, organic farmers use a suite of “certified” pesticides and have to be trained in their application. This was my first clue that organics was mostly theater and not a vastly different enterprise than other small, so-called conventional farms.
So why should these other farmers, then, accept the silly label “conventional,” which is not even a thing? It communicates nothing about a particular farmer’s practices, other than signifying the farmer is not among an elite. It does leave a farmer open to the slanders of pro-organics propagandists, such as that “conventional” produce is not as “safe” as “organic” produce; that conventional food is “contaminated” with pesticides residues; and the pernicious lie that conventional farming is the unsustainable one: They are both unsustainable over the long term.
What I’m saying, in short, is that the word “organic” works through the “halo effect,” meaning its associations create warm and fuzzy feelings in consumers . . . unlike that clunky, boring, vaguely disparaging, non-term “conventional”.
Which is certified bullshit.
Gentile
I’m almost ashamed to admit I did not realize until well into adult life that I was a gentile. The reason I do not have any actual shame about this late reckoning is that I didn’t really understand what the word meant. I’ve come to see it as just another marker of non-affiliation, like the term “conventional farmer.” I don’t even see it as a designation imposed on me by Jews so much as by the Catholic Church with its Bible studies view of the world.
No Jew I know has ever called me a gentile, and why should they? “Shall we have our homosexual gentile friends over for the Seder this year?” is a sentence unlikely to have been spoken by them.
Gentile is a word I only heard uttered in catechism classes held in the basement of our lovely Romanesque cathedral, Good Shepherd Parish, in Toledo, Ohio. We youngsters were told many Jewish Bible stories, but the nuns never told us that we were learning any such thing. They called them Old Testament stories. In fact, I don’t think they ever clarified for us what a Jew even was, other than that Jesus was one. It was as opaque a term as gentile.
Imagine the eight-year-old Catholic boy listening raptly to these Old Testament stories in the church basement. Once upon a time there lived many Jews who were Jesus’s ancestors, subjected to many stresses and adventures over time. Floods, murders, sacrifices, expulsions, wars, wanderings, sexploits, the whole lot (pun intended). These Jews’ trials were described as somehow presaging the arrival of the star Jew on the scene, Jesus. Meanwhile, there were all these gentiles in the background, extras in the scenes, except where they might have interacted as antagonists, as Philistines and such, but mostly as observers, waiting for something to happen.
In later parts of the Bible, Jesus is now The Jew, and somehow his being called a Jew is now something of an affront. There are still all these others around called gentiles, like Romans, who gawk on in amazement, just like in the Old Testament. Some of the other Jews in the story follow their fellow Jew, Jesus, but most do not. Most of the gentiles in the background also do not follow this Jesus, and the whole thrust of some of these Bible stories seems to be to try to convince all these gentiles to follow this Jewish Jesus whom even most Jews do not follow. The gentiles needed to get their act together! What does “follow” mean anyway? It means Jesus is their savior, of both Jews and the gentiles, if only they believed it. What was he saving? Souls. OK. Who wouldn’t want their soul saved? What’s wrong with these Jews and gentiles that they do not want their souls saved?
This ends badly, with Jesus being nailed up, etc., and it turns out the other Jews are behind it all! Somehow Jew and gentile have swapped places, with the post-resurrection Jesus being in effect cured of his Jewishness and now all about saving just gentiles. We are left wondering how the Jews could have been so stupid as to kill this savior of their souls. This was sold to us as The Best Story Ever Told.
OK. I grew up and forgot about this Jew/gentile business. Then, sometime in my early twenties, I think it was, I heard the most famous utterance of the word “gentiles” in a speech, and for once I really listened to it:
“. . . when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
It’s a religious speech, of course, what does one expect from an American orator? But how disappointing to realize that, in the biblical order of things, I’m part of essentially a wastebasket taxon synonymous with “other”. This realization came as an anticlimax because as a non-believer being a gentile doesn’t feel like anything at all.
I file “gentile” under “antiquated biblical bullshit.”
Queer
This is one of those NPR words (NPR = National Pabulum Radio), and it is a nauseating affectation. When the media outlet is affecting to be hip about the matter of homosexuality, it refers to queer books and films, queer style decisions, queer recipes, queer animal relationships. One gathers they think they’re being a bit chic using such language, but they’re not. They’re being puerile.
My husband and I use “queer” in everyday conversation but usually with ironic or naughty overtones because it is still pejorative when referring to gay people, about on a par with “negro” and decidedly informal. We never use it as a deadpan synonym for same-sex relationships. Not that “gay” is that much better. A detour first:
I was once a member of a speaker’s bureau that held talks throughout the State of Maine in the mid-1990s, on the eve of a nasty referendum that sought to make antidiscrimination legislation illegal. I know that’s hard to believe, but the ballot question asked citizens to enact a law that would pre-empt any law that made discrimination against gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons illegal. We members of the speaker’s bureau went to Rotaries, Kiwanis Clubs, churches, etcetera, to share stories about living in Maine in the shadow of the referendum. Some of these speakers were parents of gay or lesbian children. It was basically a big coming out party for rural Mainers with same-sex tendencies, and their allies.
My schtick was reminding Kiwanis Clubs that “kiwanis” comes from a native Ojibwe expression meaning “to make noise” and “make oneself known.” And here I am! Eventually, alas, I revealed too much about myself — to my fellow speakers.
A gentleman in the audience once asked an earnest question which I can only approximate so many years later: “Why did you take such a good word as ‘gay’ and ruin it?” I shocked everyone by basically agreeing with him (though I cannot be held personally responsible for co-opting the word “gay” to mean homosexual). The current usage is not something I relish, and I started to go into the history of how “gay” came to mean “homosexual.” It was first a euphemism used by homosexuals in the 1940s to hide their . . . proclivities. At the time, “gay” meant “carefree” in living, even “loose” in morality, so that female prostitutes were known as “gay women” . . . At this point in my talk my co-speaker blew a gasket and intervened and began talking over me. I learned, implicitly, that I was supposed to say something soothing and conciliatory, because we were there to take care of people’s feelings. We were not there to reveal the rot that lay hidden our language. I got out of that group PDQ.
“Don we now our gay apparel.” “But I feel so gay in a melancholy way.” “We’ll have a gay old time!” All these usages are now extinct, no one would dream of using the word this way now, but there’s nothing I can do about it. “Gay” is now firmly entrenched in the lexicon as a synonym for “homosexual” — which is also an inept word, a weird portmanteau of the Greek “homos” (same/like) and the Latin “sexus + alis” (sex + adjective-forming suffix), creating an abominable, medicalized chimera with too many goddamn syllables! Yet, it has the virtue of at least being descriptive.
Which is a roundabout way of getting back to my rant against the current use of “queer” as an alleged non-insult for the polysyllabic “homosexual.”
I happen to like the traditional use of queer. Here in New England, it means “odd,” “out-of-the-ordinary,” even “uncanny.” Who hasn’t recited these lines by Robert Frost?
My little horse must thing it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
This is a definitive New England usage in the poem, and there are still old-timers here in Maine who, when something doesn’t strike them as quite right, express their chagrin with a drawn out “quee-yah.” That young man in my epigraph, who built a cabin in the woods and who eschewed society — he might be called “woods-queer.”
In Susan Glaspell’s classic one-act play, Trifles, a neighbor, Hale, describes to the County Attorney the distressed aspect of a woman who has just murdered her husband:
HALE: She was rockin’ back and forth. She had her apron in her hand and was kind of—pleating it.
COUNTY ATTORNEY: And how did she—look?
HALE: Well, she looked queer.
COUNTY ATTORNEY: How do you mean—queer?
HALE: Well, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. And kind of done up.
Alas, I don’t get to determine the course of the language. Such traditional usages are rapidly being exterminated, with outfits like NPR leading the charge — along with the goddamned queers themselves. If it’s not bad enough that the pejorative use of queer is being normalized in talk-show-host banter, we now have the Alphabet Gang, a loose confederation (read “farrago”) of alleged “sexual minorities” marching in lockstep under perhaps the most ridiculous acronym ever devised, with a big fat “Q” for “queer” plopped right in the middle of it, a shuffling plethora of letters that self-revises in a seemingly daily manner: LGBTQIAPN + and so forth, more may be added depending on the weather or the degree of mental exhaustion in the speaker. This is beyond parody; it’s identity as a game of SCRABBLE. Exactly whom does such an acronym represent? I don’t know, but it seems awfully quee-yah to me!
I can’t imagine what my reaction would be if 66-year-old me and my 72-year-old partner were introduced at a gathering as “our queer friends,” or “the lovely queer couple down the road.” They have a queer little farmhouse with queer little animals. Isn’t that queer?
When you find yourself walking on eggshells, stomp on them!
Just call us husbands, for cripes’ sake.
Anything but this faux-trendy bullshit.
“It is a queer life we live, and the way we treat ourselves is equally queer.”
Thoreau’s Journal, 1841.
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