Mister Rogers was not a pussy

As I was listening to the latest Back To Work episode titled Start with Anger, End with a Sign, and Merlin was talking about Mister Rogers and how cool (back when the word had meaning) he was. And then Merlin said:

…how much the things that you would perceive as being his values really do matter to him: being very humble and very interested in being a good neighbor You know what I really got from that article that was really cool, was how strong a man Fred Rogers was. He was not a… Mister Rogers was not a …

It took me a second to figure out that Merlin wasn’t suffering from a palsy or an affectation, but that the audio had been muted in post-production, and there I was literally yelling at my MacBook Air going “Mister Rogers was not a what?”

Then I listened to the After Dark and heard Merlin say, several times, that his favorite title suggestion was, “Mister Rogers was not a pussy.” Of course, listening to it after the fact, I knew not only wasn’t the title, but that it hadn’t even been heard in the episode.

Dan edits the episodes so they can be marked as ‘clean’ in iTunes. He has explained before that Apple won’t highlight podcasts which aren’t ‘clean’. I can’t fault Dan for that, because that’s the way that the system works, and he’s not in control of it. It struck me as fairly ironic. Dan and Merlin had been talking about the little passive aggressive signs that people put around rather than addressing the people who are causing the problem. And in that episode, Dan has to censor the audio to avoid causing a problem with Apple, who have these rules to prevent them from getting flooded with letters and Internet petitions and phone calls from people who unexpectedly heard a “bad” word and are now deeply offended and have to make their grievances known.

At the risk of stereotyping people who have the luxury of making mountains out of molehills, let me just guess that the vast majority of people who make such complaints would be upper/middle class white people whose status in life allows them enough free time to care about such things. And not only care about them, but take them and make them into “causes” because they’re afraid Little Johnny or Little Susie might overhear a word that they might repeat in front of the neighbors or the teachers or their Sunday school teachers. I would not be at all surprised to find that these people would claim themselves to be quite religious, but in actual practice they may more attention to the words of Rush Limbaugh than the words of Jesus.

Of course, then there are those on the liberal side of things who would probably have complained about Merlin’s use of the word “pussy” and written a long blog post about how that word when used as a slur is degrading to women and reveals that Merlin is obviously a closet misogynist. The blog post would end with a call to boycott — excuse me, I mean personcott — the entire 5by5 network of women-haters.

Meanwhile millions of men, women, and children are living in poverty and going to bed hungry despite the fact that there’s plenty of food in the world to feed them, but we’ll get to that just after we finish writing this angry letter.

(And no, the irony was not lost on me that I had become angered by this while listening to a podcast about fruitless and wasteful anger.)

This newspaper clipping was taped to the inside of one of the kitchen cabinets when we bought our house in 2003.

We didn’t know the people who lived here before us. If I did I would ask them why it was on the inside of the cabinet instead of the outside, or on the refrigerator, or somewhere else. Was that the cabinet where they kept their secret stash of Double Stuf™ Oreos which they would raid whenever someone made them irrationally angry? I don’t know, but I bet there’s a story there somewhere.

All I know is that we’ve kept the note there, and I read it every time I open that cabinet door. Dan quoted a similar proverb on the show, which is what made me think of it tonight.

Anyway, a good episode, go listen here. And know that your ears will be protected from any and all fleeting expletives and most other words likely to offend those of Very Delicate Nature.