I get the sense that Rahm Emanuel is a fun person to work with. Yes, it’s probably valid to lay a good part of the blame for Obama’s muddled congressional strategy on health care reform at his feet—as a reporter mentioned to me at a party the other night, it’s not a good idea to have a legislative guy as your chief of staff because you tend to lose sight of the big picture in favor of process. Effectiveness aside, he appears to be a man unconcerned with appearances who has a bit of a penchant for using his foul mouth. In a world of polished, uptight, priggish pols, his loose manner is always entertaining, if not downright invigorating.

And despite the fact that I woke up one morning during the presidential campaign reeling from a dream in which I made out with her, I’ve always had a visceral dislike of Sarah Palin. She, the consummate politician, has applied so many coats of varnish to her personality that she can’t make a move without the veneer starting to crack and peel, revealing just how phony¹ she is underneath it all.

This is all prologue to today’s lovely nugget of political marginalia:

Palin, the mother of a child with Down’s Syndrome, called on President Barack Obama to end Emanuel’s tenure as chief of staff for having allegedly called participants in a strategy session “f—-ing retarded.”

I’m tempted to say that this entire debate is fucking retarded, but I’ll refrain—not in order to spare sensibilities, but rather because it’s not as droolingly inane and cretinous a debate as it first appears.

Attentive readers will recall that this dust-up began with the 2008 release of Tropic Thunder, a wonderfully subversive satire of Hollywood starring Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. The brilliant scene below did the yeoman’s work of offending:

Several groups representing mentally disabled people rose up and protested the film, some even urging a boycott. Most even seemed to understand that the movie’s target wasn’t the mentally disabled, but rather simply objected to the use of the word “retard’. Jerry McCarthy, the Executive Director of North Shore Arc, expressed this most explicitly:

Through the years, we have faced an uphill battle to move away from what we call the “R Word” because the word “retard” has such negative connotations from years of bullying, school yard taunting and general ignorance. I felt we were making great strides — state lawmakers recently distanced themselves from the “R word” by changing the name of the Department of Mental Retardation. As of next year, it will become the Department of Developmental Services. In a ceremony in the Oval Office in July 2003, President Bush signed an executive order changing the name of The President’s Committee on Mental Retardation to the President’s Committee on People with Intellectual Disabilities.

Fair enough, say you? The word’s offensive to many, so let’s stigmatize it out of polite usage just like we do the N-word and, say, the C-word.

Well, it’s right there that we run into trouble, and it’s telling that a thoughtless person like Palin walked right into it:

Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them – is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.

First and foremost, yes, both “nigger” and “retard” are terms of abuse, but only to a historical illiterate or moral degenerate can they ever be equated. Equating them as Palin does casually or as McCarthy does by implication only serves to muddy the waters by expanding the list of uniquely awful words to include merely offensive ones. An uncharitable take on Palin’s angle is that this is exactly what she is trying to do.

Secondly, as a political project for raising sensitivity towards the mentally disabled, tabooing the “R-word” is particularly ineffective. I’ve littered this essay with several synonymous (and presumably similarly offensive) constructions: “droolingly inane”, “cretinous”, even “thoughtless person”. Now I may be insensitive for doing so, but I’d wager that many readers wouldn’t even have noticed had I not just pointed them out. The category “stupid” is deeply ingrained in our language, and while we may want to be more sensitive about how we throw it about, banishing it wholesale is both impossible and undesirable.

Finally, capricious taboos have the unintended consequence of giving the taboo’d word more negative connotations than it may otherwise have had. I wrote about this almost three years ago with regards to “cunt” and feminism, and I largely stand by my musings. Do we really want to give “retard” more power than the juvenile schoolyard connotations it has today?

This is all to say that language is an immensely complicated, living system which both shapes and is defined by our politics. It’s too simplistic to say that we oughtn’t try to tamper with what we cannot fully comprehend. Thinking/writing/speaking is political, and politics is in large part a battle over language. The best we can hope to do is to always mean what we say and say what we mean. If something is so maddeningly stupid that only a schoolyard taunt will adequately express it, well then I’d argue it’s justifiably fucking retarded.²