Otus the Head Cat

Bullies' day camp insult, 'pelosi,' is hate speech

Dear Otus,

I am at my wits' end, so I turn to you as a desperate last resort.

Tuesday our fourth-grade daughter came home from day camp in tears and has been inconsolable ever since.

Evidently, some of the camp mean girls cornered her over by the tetherball court and verbally abused her. They called her "a pelosi" over and over and over again until she ran to the camp nurse and begged to go home early.

You've given so much good advice over the decades, do you have any tips in this case?

-- Patricia D'Alesandro,

Benton

Dear Patricia,

It was wholly a pleasure to hear from you and to be able to extend my heartfelt sympathy on having to deal with this execrable cruelty.

Young girls can be so incredibly abusive. The words they pick up from TV can psychologically scar for life, especially the P word.

I have some sage advice taught me in 1974 by my Asian/American mother, Taai Roop, before I left the Fayetteville trailer park for my forever home with Owner.

Mom was a shy and delicate full-blooded seal-point Siamese, but she had an inner strength that had been forged in the crucible of abuse from years of dealing with the park's feline bullies in that rough south section of town.

It was a tough life. The trailer park, near what is now Shenandoah Mobile Home Park on East 15th, was across from city warehouses and animal services. The pound was Fayetteville's Gitmo. Animals went in, but they seldom came out.

The park was full of university students renting the trailers. That meant there was frequent turnover and a steady stream of pets coming and going.

That also meant there was an incessant battle for pecking order among the trailer park's cats and dogs. Cliques were formed and dissolved, not unlike what your daughter experienced on the tetherball court at day camp.

While I'm thinking about it, I've often wondered what the childhood fascination is with tetherball. I mean, all you have is a pole with a volleyball attached by a rope. The goal is to hit the ball until it wraps around the pole and smacks your opponent in the face and he runs off screaming.

The sport was tried briefly in the 1922 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, but was dropped for lack of interest because the banned (due to WWI) German national team -- the world's finest tetherball competitors -- drew all the best players to its Deutsche Kampfspiele in Frankfurt am Main.

Tetherball has a rather macabre origin. Invented by the Maya around AD 400 in pre-Columbian Mexico, the sport of tetherball, or Taa'jche', was played to give honor and respect to Junab K'uj and the Yuumtsilo'ob, the god of maize and his assorted lords.

Taa'jche' was played with the greased skull of a vanquished foe attached by the twisted sinews of the toloc (black spiny-tailed iguana) to a 10-foot pole made from the bundled stems of young dioon cycads that grew alongside the sacred cenote of Chichen Itza.

The matches frequently lasted two or three days, until one contestant died of exhaustion.

Mesoamerican scholars debate what particularly stinging taunts were used during the matches to "psych out" an opponent. Perhaps one player called the other a yuumtsilo'ob del bolon ti' K'uj, or "god of the underworld." Maybe they used the Mayan invective equivalent of pelosi, which means "hairy" in Italian.

The Mayans, exceedingly proud of their hairless bodies, would have been most offended. And so should your daughter.

In current political campaign parlance, associating one's opponent with the boogeyman of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is about the most vile, offensive and egregious ploy available. Conservative candidates have made "the wicked witch of the West (Coast)" synonymous with pork, insider deals and the drive to make the Washington Redskins drop Redskins because it's considered a racial slur.

I've read there's a movement to urge the Redskins to drop Washington as an embarrassment to the team's name.

In Arkansas, from the Senate and gubernatorial campaigns down to the contest for attorney general and Big Rock Township constable, " pelosi" translates to a lack of "Arkansas values and Arkansas common sense" -- a deliberately nebulous phrase designed to evoke a naive, simplistic negative reaction.

My advice: I would classify pelosi as a hate word and demand the mean girls at day camp be expelled.

Until next time, Kalaka reminds you that the best slogan of the current campaign season is, "It's time to Reagan up!"

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