You Kant, Always Get What You Want
I'd come to the realization a while ago that my relationship to the Bear Community boils down to a simple impedance mismatch. I'm co-opting that term from the EE folks, as so many of us computer-nerdy types have done, and applying it to a social/temprament thing. For those non-nerdy types out there, and impedance mismatch is essentially the fallout from connecting two electrical systems that are not compatible. There's no superiority involved on either system, just an incompatibility. The electrical mismatch for me is irony.
At a recent party, I was trundling through some plays-on-bear-words as might be applied to the upcoming Hairrison (on "Harrison Street", get it?) so-called "Only Bear Street Fair", looking for what I considered to be absurd (and dare I say, ironic) combinations. Since they were having "Bearrrunches" on late Saturday and Sunday mornings, I suggested "Furrriday" as a name for Friday ("Umm, it goes 'Wednesday', 'Fursday', Friday", I was told) and calling the private security team "The Fuzz" ("They already are"). Ooookay, then.
Like I said, that's just a mismatch of where different personalities and tempraments gravitate on the irony-scale.
Then there are those who take irony, who take 'making the best of a bad situation', who take 'whistling past the graveyard' and pound them into something literal and absurd for the purpose of mischaracterizing another. Those are a horse's ass of a different color.
There is no love lost between me and police and military organizations (remember when they used to be two differently-purposed things?), but I respect the roles, the offices and the purviews of each, of both. For example, I have absolutely no respect for the persons of W. and of Ronald Reagan, but I will always respect the Office of the President. I might even go so far as to say that most of my antipathy towards those two had to do with their obvious disrespect of the office they held. (GoB damn it feels good to talk about W's presidency in the past tense. Try it at home, kids!)
So when I joke about the pokey, when I criticize a penal system gone mad, I'm only doing what I must because I cannot do what I want: the immovable object of prison and the unstoppable force of the police system had both been obstacles (however temporary) to my happiness.
So when I spread a red gingham tablecloth over the immovable object and play tea party with Miss Penny Prissypants, or when I attach rainbow-glitter streamers and pinwheels to the unstoppable force just so I have something pretty and shiny-shiny to look at, I'm not disrespecting the law nor am I underappreciating the gravity of a DUI or the responsibilities one must assume. I'm actually acknowledging the immovability and the unstoppability, respectively.
Literalists are fine, if annoying. Those who insist on inventing a literalism that isn't there should be forced to sit down with me to tea and streamers and pinwheels.
Right, Penny Prissypants?