Take it from Snee: Stop being retarded

OK, so some people are up in arms about President Barack Obama (as opposed to President of the Obama Spaghetti Co., Greg Obama) comparing his bowling to the performance one would expect at the Special Olympics.

It’s not the best idea to make fun of Special Athletes. I mean, they’re funny, but not in a mean way; more funny in an affirmation-of-life way, like Life Is Beautiful.

So, I’m not going to defend Obama’s comment. This is precisely why it’s retarded for a sitting POTUS to appear on Leno.

Uh-oh. Looks like I said a bad word: “retarded.”

Contrary to what the Special Olympics Committee and others will tell you, it’s not. Strap those helmets on a little tighter, tards, because we’re about to explore the r-word.

The perceived offense is that, by calling you (yes, you) retarded, I am comparing you to the sort of people who might compete in the Special Olympics. Interesting, right?

But, what if I called you an idiot? Or an imbecile? Or even a moron? At most, you might believe I am comparing you to the average viewer of American Idol, correct?

However, if I used any of Bugs Bunny’s favorite (mispronounced) pejoratives from above, the original meaning would be the same: a mentally disabled or challenged person through no willful ignorance of their own.

According to what research I could find about the word (feel free to contribute in the comments below), using “retarded” to describe an intellectually disabled person without calling them stupid was first recorded in 1895. From that point onwards, “mentally retarded” was the preferred medical diagnosis for people inflicted with an IQ less than 70.

You know what else happened around that time? (No, not Hitler …. Well, yes, but mildly unrelated.) It steadily became rude to call intellectually disabled people “dummies” or “idiots.”

Fast-forward to the 1960s – yeah, baby, yeah – and people, being the sensitive folks we are, started calling average misspell-your-last-name or spill-your-coffee morons retarded. Naturally, other people started to take offense, especially when “retard” was used towards genuinely disabled folks as an insult.

The Special Olympics Committee and the American Association on Mental Retardation didn’t encourage their members to reclaim the word like other insulted communities in the U.S. In fact, the AAMA changed their name in 2006 to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities – distancing themselves from the term “mentally retarded.”

And if you search the Special Olympics’ web site, the words “retard” and “retarded” only show up once: in a news brief titled, “Special Olympics  and the r-word.” (McB: is this band name taken???) In the article, it is only spelled out in comparison to other words like “nigger, kike, chink, crip, faggot, and spic.”

So, according to both of these authoritative sources, the word “retarded” and all derivations no longer apply to intellectually disabled people, unless you’re being a dick. If you’re curious about my continued use of the term “intellectually disabled,” that’s because it’s the preferred nomenclature. You can call a special person that or, preferably, their ####ing name.

While I respect this decision, I don’t agree with the next point in their article. The Special Olympics wants to encourage people to not use the word “retarded” anymore. At all. In fact, they want it treated like a bad word like the others they helpfully listed above: “nigger, kike, chink, crip, faggot, and spic.”

Here’s the problem: special people aren’t retarded anymore. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t an intellectually disabled counterculture where special people call each other “retards” or “crips.” If the disabled community has reclaimed the word “retarded” to strip its power away like black people reclaimed “nigger” or gay people reclaimed “faggot,” then it has done it so quietly that nobody alerted the Kennedys.

That said, I know better than to call someone a “nigger” or “faggot” or any of the other listed words because

1. I’m not a bigot (not consciously, anyway).
2. I’m not a member of their community.

Some people don’t know better. We call them morons and, now, retards. In case you’re having trouble figuring out why you can’t use those words, let me tell you a brief story about my dad.

My dad retired as a Senior Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force, of which I am proud. He was a non-commissioned officer, meaning he was an enlisted man given authority by a commissioned officer to tell other enlisted people what to do.

During his time in the Air Force, he and other enlisted airmen would describe themselves as “enlisted dog, pig, swine, patooie.” (The latter part was simulated spit, not some obscure French dessert made of actual spit.)

If you were a civilian and called him or any other enlisted person that, then you’d probably end up on a wall somewhere. If you were an officer and said that, you’d get saluted, called “sir” and become the new decoration in the NCO Club’s urinal.

Why? Because those were their (possessive) words. In the past, the cultural divide between enlisted and officers transcended more than a college degree. Officers and enlisted soldiers came from extreme opposite societies.

Officers were from the upper class, educated and expected to know things like fencing and ballroom dancing. Basically, they were the assholes from every period piece romance.

Enlisted guys, on the other hand, were whipped if they didn’t wipe their asses the correct way (open-palm and folded, not rumpled) or openly practiced Catholicism. Guess what they were called during these floggings?

So, while the gay, black, Latino and other communities have reclaimed their words and used them in art and conversation to demonstrate how they, as people, were shaped in part by oppression (and also to bug the hell out of straight whites), the mentally disabled community has merely released the word “retard” into the wind like a dead butterfly, as they did with “idiot,” “imbecile” and “moron.”

If it’s OK to call parking cops, sitting presidents and Web site commenters idiots, then “retards” is just as fine-dandy. Sorry, special people, but you don’t own it anymore, so it’s fair use. I won’t call you “retarded” for that, because it’s mean, but it’s not the smartest move your sponsors ever made.

And if a non-physically or -intellectually disabled person gives you grieve about using that word, call them a f##ktard. That’ll get their goat.