“NAME THREE”—On the Existence and Identification of Imaginary People

 

         I was writing an article about the cultural changes I experienced moving from Philadelphia to Las Vegas, and at one point, I discussed the practice of carrying water around wherever you go because this particular practice differs somewhat in the two cities.  And as I delved deeper and deeper into the phenomenon, I used the word “retards” to describe a certain group of people.

 

         Before I publish these things online, I usually have my wife review them for typos, grammatical blunders, logical gaps, and other features that may discomfit or annoy my reading public.  On this occasion, she strongly suggested I not use the term “retards” to characterize the people I was describing.  She said it was an ugly term for the cognitively disabled and would put off some of my readers.

 

         “But nobody uses the word that way anymore,” I said.  “It doesn’t mean cognitively disabled.  It means a dope or a low-class boob.”

 

         “But there are still people who would be annoyed because you’re supposed to say neurodivergent or something.  Some people will be offended.”

 

“Name three,” I said.

 

I’ve been doing this for a while now.  Whenever I hear there are a lot of people who think something or did something, or believe something, or will do something, I ask myself whether I know any such people.  I am acquainted with a fair number of people, probably in triple digits, and if I can’t think of somebody I know who might fit the imagined profile, I often conclude that such people don’t exist.

 

It started with Obama in the 2008 election.  I remember being told Obama would have trouble in the election because of all the people who wouldn’t vote for him because he is black.  After I heard this a few times, I realized I didn’t know anybody like that.  So I started asking, “Who?  Name three.” And nobody could name even one. 

 

It’s hard to imagine such a person, actually.  Plenty of people didn’t vote for Obama, but refusing to vote for Obama “because he is black” means that a person would have voted for him if he were white.  In other words, this is someone who voted for Mondale and Dukakis and Bill Clinton and Gore and Kerry, but when Obama came along, they refused.  “Vote for a Negro?  Are you kidding? No way!”  In a nation of a third of a billion people, you can’t say there’s nobody who fits the criteria, but there can’t be more than a handful and they couldn’t affect the results of an election.

 

(Going back into American history, and not very far back, there probably were such people.  In the 1960s, racist Southern Democrats could be persuaded to vote for a Northern liberal like JFK or Hubert Humphrey, but if someone like Jesse Jackson had been nominated by the Democratic Party, Southern Democrats would not have gone along.  Those folks are long gone.)

 

More recently, I have been fed the same line about Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.  There are just too many Americans, I am told, who won’t vote for a woman.  Again, I say: name three.

 

There are certainly Democrats who stayed home and didn’t vote for Hillary or Kamala, but does that mean they wouldn’t vote for a woman?  No.  It means they wouldn’t vote for those women, who are arguably the worst Democratic candidates in at least the last century.  I could go into more detail about their manifest flaws, but this is not about Hillary or Kamala or Obama, remember?  It’s about using the word “retard” to describe people who have no real physical or mental impairment but are nevertheless, you know, retarded.  And my position is that nobody is offended by the term retarded because nobody uses that term to describe someone with a physical or mental disability.  “Retarded” just doesn’t mean that anymore.  Today “retarded” only means things like driving your car, alone, with an N-95 mask on.

 

The meaning of words changes over time.  “Zounds” and “gadzooks,” both of which refer to the wounds inflicted on Jesus Christ, were fairly powerful cuss words at one time, and now they are archaic joke words like cowabunga.  “Retarded” has a history as well.  At one time, “idiot” and “moron” were clinical terms used to describe different levels of cognitive disability, but they lost any clinical meaning and became silly insults used by The Three Stooges and others.  “Retarded” replaced them because it was thought to be a more elegant and gentle and descriptive term.  Now “retarded” has become a joke too.

 

And it’s only a joke.  No one is truly offended by it anymore.  My definitive proof came recently when Donald Trump called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz a retard.  There was enormous pushback to this remark by Democrats and the press and other Trump-haters, but none of it was based in the use of the word itself.  Instead, the response was a straight denial of the charge.  Tim Walz is not a retard, they said.  Trump is the retard.  Renaming the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts the “Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts”---now there’s the retard. In other words, though the response to Trump’s insult was outrage, the responders nevertheless accepted the modern meaning of “retard” and “retarded.”  Everybody accepts it---right, left, Trump-lovers, Trump-haters, the woke, and the unwoke.  Even retards.

 

Copyright2026MichaelKubacki