John Nollson / Badtime for Bonzo
"John Nollson / Badtime for Bonzo" John Nollson BADTIME FOR BONZO There...
...Every time a politician speaks up for the ape family, you guys set out to ruin him," he said bitterly...
...Take the case of feminist English and its demands from, and depredations on, Standard English...
...Bonzo cut in...
...In fact, a logical mind might be thrown by Eliot's sentence, and go looking for some antecedent to they other than that inappropriate anyone...
...Those unnamed twins whose eyes brimmed over with tears of anger, humiliation, or righteous indignation at such organized grammatical misogyny, or the tradition of good English that has functioned for centuries, that accords with other Indo-European languages, and that, despite the unrecapturable feelings THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 29...
...We weren't born yesterday, and we weren't created yesterday either...
...His hand was a bit shaky as he reached for the cocktail shaker and filled his glass...
...Were they really lovers...
...I wondered aloud...
...He shares a large condominium in Newport Beach with his old friend, J. Fred Muggs...
...Bonzo offered me some grudging praise since I was the first author to track him down--except for Irving Stone, of course, who spent hours interviewing him while writing a fictionalized account of the life of Charles Darwin...
...Not that," said Bonzo disgustedly...
...And, with that, he did indeed begin to weep, taking several minutes to regain his composure...
...I do not care how many good writers have at times fallen into such i l l o g i c - - t h e r e simply is no way in which anyone or everyone can suddenly multiply, as if it were a rabbit, into a they...
...That's not the point at all...
...We're just trying to speak up for our species, to defend ourselves from the charge that we are descendents of the lower animals on the one hand and ancestors of the higher animals on the other...
...John Simon is the author, most recently, of Paradigms Lost...
...As he picked at the shell, his voice took on a tone of unexpected hostility...
...This use, therefore, "did not reflect a belief that masculine pronouns could refer to both sexes," our authors claim, on what evidence they do not choose to state...
...But let me be strictly serious...
...But it isn't odd at all that the only authority of any kind whom Miller and Swift actually quote by name in this section of their book is not a grammarian, linguist, writer, or other word-oriented person, but an obscure psychologist now called Wendy Martyna, though in a book she edited in 1972 she was still Wendy Martin...
...Chimpanzees, for example, happen to have exquisite table manners, but they succumb to anthropological s t e r e o t y p i n g - - j u s t like Muggs here--by scattering eggshells all over the place...
...The most insightful is R. Bonzo himself, the engaging chimpanzee who once starred with Ronald Reagan in a classic Hollywood film...
...You see," said Muggs, "it took us a while to sort things out...
...Back in England, he jumped on Thomas Huxley during one of his proevolution lectures...
...Left-wing press...
...Touch...
...Take, for example, the war on the masculine pronoun in its all-encompassing sense...
...Humpf," said Bonzo, revealing his teeth as he curled back his upper lip...
...What's to be gained by that...
...Yes," Bonzo agreed...
...We don't want the responsibility," Bonzo said soberly...
...if by committed feminists, the results would most likely reflect what the investigators set out to prove...
...What emotions had reduced them to tears...
...Now, I ask you, who shall prevail...
...Well, the zoo hasn't withered away as he predicted, and it's only recently that we've been able to recover from the 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 bitter disappointment of it all...
...Typical human reasoning," Muggs said impatiently...
...I remember when I first raised this subject with Ron many years ago...
...I asked...
...Some of us, ashamed of our apehood, are mired in self-hatred because we haven't evolved...
...Afraid so," I replied sheepishly...
...But little Beagle still has to wear a hearing aid to compensate for the damage caused by I.yndon Johnson's rough handling of his ears...
...I asked reprovingly...
...I exclaimed incredulously...
...iQQ~Q0O0I6ii0Q0I000Q00gI~0i0~00000~0oQo606QQQIQQQQ0QoQI0gOQI0I0QqQ~Q~g000O6O~QIoQgg0IQQ0Q0Qo0g00~g0OI00OQ0000D~gQ~080~0IQI6e8~8~Q0Og0QQ0O000t00ggB0I~0doOQ0Ia John Nollson BADTIME FOR BONZO There are some who know more than others about the ongoing political struggle between evolutionists and creationists...
...At this point, Muggs, wearing a navy blue blazer, a light blue LaCoste shirt, and a pair of gleaming white trousers, limped out to the table...
...For much as our embattled authors advocate such constructions as "I shouldn't like to punish anyone, even if they'd done me wrong" (this from George Eliot), the construction is manifestly illogical and grates on any ear connected to a thinking brain...
...Eventually, the three of them were replaced by Tom Brokaw, who is more handsome than all of them put together...
...Bonzo did not perish in a tragic fire, as has been erroneously reported...
...Communism is an evolutionist plot...
...He used to be a Democrat, you know, and that's why he believed in evolution...
...Another reporter wanting to know about Reagan and evolution, I suppose," he said with an air of resignation...
...You're trying to stop Ron from speaking out...
...Years ago, just like everybody else, we used to be Democrats...
...He took a sip as he studied me...
...I shall address my remarks chiefly to this...
...But, along with like-minded feminists, Miller and Swift insist that "like 'generic' man, 'generic' he fosters the misconception that the standard human being is male...
...After all, Darwin put apes on the map, affording them the singular honor of being the progenitors of man...
...The outcome allegedly showed that "at all levels of education people whose native tongue is English seem to know that he, him, and his are gender-specific [lovely word?] and cannot do the double duty" of representing both men and women...
...You're trying to stifle dissent...
...Isn't it odd that in no non-Englishspeaking country have women's groups found it necessary to quarrel in this mode with the language for psychopolitical (or is it psychopathological) reasons...
...It's a serious problem in our community...
...They put the old boy away for that, but we've been getting even ever since...
...But then I pointed out to him that On the Origin of Species and the first volume of Capital were both published in 1859...
...Miller and Swift then refer to "several recent systematic investigations of how people of both sexes use and understand personal pronouns...
...After all, we thought that Darwin would show us the way to true liberation and selffillfillment...
...Evolution is not a Communist plot...
...If I were frivolous, I could remark that at least half of such statements carry a negative value, and that women might count themselves lucky to be excluded from such asseverations as "Everyone is dumber than he ought to be" or "Anyone can become the victim of his gullibility...
...I was much encouraged by the upbeat tone the interview had taken and I thought it an appropriate time to depart...
...We were in favor of the welfare state and the progressive income tax...
...We know about these things," said Muggs, seconding the suggestion of his friend...
...Bonzo explains that he joined the Screen Actors Guild at Reagan's urging...
...He reported that Checkers, Nixon's spaniel, has lapsed into senility but that Fala, Roosevelt's puppy, is still going strong in his sixtieth year...
...In fact, he himself is the source of those rumors, for he feared that reporters would set upon him and give him no rest now that his former co-star is a prominent political figure...
...The real point was that Marx was a Darwinist...
...But along comes Governor Reagan, who does nothing more than give us a chance to regain our self-respect as a species, and the left-wing press jumps all over him...
...Now we know better...
...Besides, it's a bum rap...
...Gee," I was forced to admit, "I never realized that Darwin was a Marxist...
...Bonzo and Muggs very graciously provided directions to Marineland of the Pacific where, they assured me, there were several intelligent and articulate dolphins who would confirm everything they had said...
...That is the key difference...
...I can't speak for my colleagues," I said firmly, "but all I am trying to do is to get the facts out to the American people...
...Whole treatises have been written by feminists to prove the enormous psychic damage done to women by the grammatical masculinity of everyone and anyone--by our saying, for instance, "Everyone was in his place" or "Anyone can make up his own mind," and the like...
...And not even rabbits could produce parthenogenetically a litter between a main and a subordinate clause...
...That certainly places things in a new light...
...Bear in mind, however, that no change ever stops there, wherever the particular there may be...
...Well, I could go out into the street right now to do a little questioning of my own and find contrary evidence aplenty...
...I mean, if Darwin is to be believed, some of us, years ago, managed to break out of our condition and make it all the way to the top of the animal kingdom...
...A HANDBOOK FOR MAIDENS by John Simon What, one might well ask, does the sacrifice of a few words matter as long as the social fabric is strengthened thereby...
...Muggs is still bitter about it...
...He has a comfortable pension...
...But for those who feel they've been left behind, well, they take it out on themselves...
...It is unlikely that any woman can recapture her feelings when the arbitrariness of that rule first struck her consciousness: it happened a long time ago, no doubt, and it was only one among many assignments to secondary status...
...We're caught in the middle of this, and the result is predictable: We're finding that many of us have enormous self-esteem problems...
...In the just-published Handbook of Nonsexist Writing," Casey Miller and Kate Swift--two journalists who previously collaborated on the book Words and Women--have a rela"l.ippincott, $8.95...
...Miller and Swift's first point in the representative chapter under discussion is that when the early English grammarians used masculine pronouns in a seemingly bisexual way, they were actually writing "grammars . . . for male readers in an age when few women were literate...
...tively long chapter on "The Pronoun Problem...
...to attempt to refute the Handbook point by point, I would have to write a book myself and stoop so low as to debate the authors about why I still prefer "manhole .cover" to their "utilityhole cover," the kind of casuistry I'd just as soon put a lid on...
...I'm proud of Ron for the stand he has taken," Bonzo said the other day, as we sat at poolside sipping banana daiquiris...
...How so...
...The humanoid ain't been evolved who can pull the wool over the eyes of an ape...
...Muggs stretched out his disproportionatelylong right arm and helped himself to one of the hard-boiled eggs which sat in a bowl in the middle of the table...
...This was no accident, no mere coincidence...
...It is not till 1850, however, that "an Act of Parliament gave official sanction to the . . . 'generic' he . . . . The new law said, 'words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females.' " The authors conclude that "as a linguistic device imposed on the language rather than a natural development arising from a broad consensus [is there such a thing as a narrow consensus?] 'generic' he is fatally flawed...
...A sense of injustice...
...Such usage has allegedly convinced countless women through history that they were second-class citizens, excluded from full participation in humankind or, as male supremacists through the ages have called it, mankind...
...Much as Chuck and AI were willing to defame us apes, we've never responded in kind...
...When I think of all the time we Wasted back in the old days trying to kick the Communists out of the union, when what we really should have been doing was going after the evolutionists, why, it's enough to make a grown chimp weep...
...Anger...
...For the first time in 50 years, we're finally getting a bit of attention as a political issue, and you guys are doing your best to smother it...
...Humiliation...
...They do not tell us, however, how and by whom these investigations were conducted...
...These days, Bonzo ?9p refers to live quietly...
...Since then, the evolutionists have been fighting among themselves and writing nasty letters to each other...
...After all these years, we're finally on the right track," he resumed, "and this time we're not about to fail...
...I'd think you'd be pleased...
...He stays in touch with other animals of political reputation...
...Sometimes, he used to cling lovingly to the eversmiling Jack Lescoulie...
...But, until now, no one has bothered to seek them out...
...My great-grandfather was one of tile first to challenge Darwin...
...Grammarians, they continue, later invented the so-called "generic" he in an attempt to change the long-established English usage (as Miller and Swift call it) of "they as a singular pronoun," of which they give quite a few examples from good writers, e.g., Lord Chesterfield's remark, "If a person is born of a gloomy temper . . . they cannot help it...
...In their previous collaboration, Words and Women, our crusading authors wrote: At a meeting ofthe Modern Language Association the story was told of twin girls who came home from school in tears one day because the teacher had explained the grammatical rule mandating the use of he when the referent is indefinite or unknown...
...And who but a committed feminist would conduct such an investigation...
...We just spread the word that Chuck plagiarized the whole thing from AI...
...Well," said Bonzo, as he picked up a well-thumbed copy of Loren Eiseley's book Darwin's Century, "we Bonzos started the disinformation campaign about Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, the notorious Chuck and AI show...
...Muggs, as many remember, used to cling lovingly to Dave Garroway on the old "Today" show...
Vol. 13 • November 1980 • No. 11
