Still Translating After All These Years

I wondered why Old Dog was dissing the term "ruling elite", since it was used extensively in the article he recommended to us, so I went back to the article to make sure. Come to find out, it never did use the term "ruling elite", although it did mention the word "elite" a few times. The word in the article was actually "oligarchy", which I assumed meant the same thing. Before I went on the internet, most of the political discussions I had were with the guys at work, first the paper mill and then the bus garage. If I had dropped a word like "oligarchy" on that crowd, nobody would have known what it meant, so I would have had to explain it to them. By the time I had explained it to them, break time would have been over and we would have gone back to work. By the next break time, everybody would have forgotten what we had been talking about and went on to a different subject.

For the 23 years I worked the paper mill, I tried unsuccessfully to teach those guys the difference between a radical and a reactionary. To them, a radical was anybody who defied authority, and the opposite of a radical was a big suck. The word "reactionary" was just not in their vocabulary. Whenever I mentioned a word that was not in their vocabulary, they would admonish me to "stop using those big words", even though the word might not be all that big. What they meant by "big words" was "unfamiliar words". They may have heard the word before and known what it meant, but it was not a word that they or their friends normally used. Most of those guys went to school together and, if one of them had inadvertently used one of those "big words" in class, the teacher would have been impressed, but all of their friends would have branded them a "big suck". Once you get something like that on your record, you can never live it down, it will follow you all of your life. If those guys had attended Gage Park High with me, they would have known that the proper term for "big suck" is "brown nose", but they didn't, and I never tried to teach them because that would have given them another name to call me.

After awhile, I got so that I could speak to those guys in their native tongue. I translated instinctively, without thinking about it. I have been told that, when you live in a foreign country, like France for instance, you start out thinking in English and translating your thoughts into French before you say them. At some point, however, you start thinking in French. I remember one time in the bus garage, somebody who had been reading something, looked up and asked me if I knew what a "Platonic relationship" meant. Without thinking, I responded "no fucking". As soon as I said it, I thought that I should have explained to them that Plato was a homosexual, so any relationship he had with a woman would not have involved sex, and that's why such relationships are called "Platonic" even unto this day. By the time I had considered this, the subject of the conversation had been changed, and it was not worth the trouble to try to bring it back on topic.

At this point, Uncle Ken will feel constrained to point out the fact that Plato was not homosexual, he was bisexual. Big fucking deal! Either way, Plato was a big suck.