Let Them Eat Cake, You Retard

Politically incorrect. Catch-phrase fascism rendering the accused guilty of stepping on an atomic word or phrase. This is such a popular way of dehumanizing people, discarding dissonant view through ad-hominem, and avoiding rational discussion altogether.

In the past couple of days there's been quite a brouhaha in the news about the Coca-Cola company tripping all over itself to apologize and avoid law-suits over a vitamin-water bottle-cap with the words "You Retard" printed on the inside, which, unfortunately, was uncapped, seen, and taken as offensive, by an Edmonton family two of whose members, Fiona and Maddy, are afflicted with some level of cognitive developmental impairment that is sometimes disparagingly referred to as "retard" in English.
To the casual observer there is cause for offense, given the use of the word retard and all. Mr. Loate's apology on the positive qualities of his afflicted daughters is good and well. However, the offense taken at the discovery of this word in a bottle-cap by his other daughter, Blake, is ignorant and misinformed in a way that would be more appropriate to Fox News or the Tea Party, yet it gets play in the Huffingtion Post.

Tragic, really. Had the man at least taken the time to understand what he was bitching about, he would have found out a few things very quickly:

1. You cannot in any way defend the intelligence of someone drinking vitamin water. Even if your other two daughters are great, your daughter, Blake, sir, is an idiot.
2. The campaign was pairing one random English word and one random French word. Retard, in this context, could only be the French word, since there is no French word "you". Retard, in French (where the English retard comes from, incidentally) means 'delay'. Nothing more. That you could not be bothered to inform yourself of this, or perhaps that you could and then suppressed the information from your publicity-seeking stunt, makes you an attention-whore of the lowest ilk, sir.
3. If you're going to be such a knee-jerk xenophobe as to try to ban the use in French of words that are spelled the same as offensive words in English, you should return the favor. For instance, is it not equally offensive to use the word bite in English, since in French, the noun bite is slang for  penis?
4. It is a testament to the mind-numbing dis-informed conformity engines that are Twitter and Facebook that these are the principal means that have helped this scandal go venereal in its unadorned, disinformed incarnation.

So I think it goes without any ambiguity that in my estimation the Loate family is a group of disingenuous, or at best quite stupid, opportunistic attention-whores.

What is fascinating is that this sort of home-spun self-perpetuating stupidity is on turbo in social media, but is really not new. The incident reminded me of the popular notion that the French phrase "qu'ils mangent de la brioche", commonly translated as "let them eat cake", (probably falsely) attributed to Marie Antoinette, was descriptive of the callousness of the upper classes in the face of the suffering of the poor (If you want to see great examples of that, look no further than American Republican legislators with free health-care denying healthcare to the poor, etc).

In the first place, the statement was probably originally uttered quotably by Marie Therese, Louis the XIV's wife. It would not have made a lot of sense in Marie Antoinette's time, since there were no recorded peasant famines at that time, and difficult to attribute to her, since Marie Antoinette was only 6 years old when the first accounting of the incident was published. In the second place, the tide of retributive injustice off-handedly accuses Marie Therese of callousness when quoting a fairly reasonable and generous law of her time: that in times of bread-scarcity, the brioche usually reserved for nobles should be shared with peasants. So 'let them eat cake' should more likely be read as don't let them go hungry, or let's share the wealth, if you will.

Repetition is not credibility, we must remember, but the accelerated incubation of durable judgements, however wrong, have essentially made an equally inaccurate issue of the bottle-cap in mere days, where the Marie Antoinette nonsense may have taken a century or two to take root.

In fairness, empty apologies will be made, hypocritical contrition will be theatrically displayed, and the incident will be dead and buried in a week at most. The upsetting thing is seeing that there will be no effort to set a record straight. Rather, faked contrition and compliance to the militant 'sensitivity' of the day will be extracted and every disinformed bystander will nod approvingly as if some form of justice had been served, while a pack of attention-seeking idiots will have had their 15 minutes.