Dirtier than thou
Dirt as a word holds rather a special pride of place in the Sowth. Despite its dictionary definition,
Dirt 1. Any foul of filthy substance, as excrement, mud, dust, etc.; whatever, adhering to anything, renders it foul or unclean; earth; as, a wagonload of dirt. [1913 Webster]
dirt may more simply be thought of down here in the old Confederacy as what most folks call soil, ground that plants are grown in, ground where agriculture is practiced.
Southrons are, in relatively large representation, throwbacks. We have a large aspect of neandertalensis, even habilis, in us. Despite everything we have done with and by science, we still have an aspect of primordialness in us, as ably demonstrated by the nature of our religion, exemplified by rituals that are almost orgasmic in their intimacy and adoration not of the deity but of his Jewish lieutenant, harkening back to the beginnings of civilization with religious prostitution and the ritual sacrifice of an earthly incarnation of the godhead. Not for us the table of the elements and Newon’s Laws in our inner lives, instead we still cling to the ancient taxonomy of earth, air, fire, and water, and dirt is the embodiment of the uneasy cooperation of the four.
This in turn may be traced to our entry onto this continent, fleeing from what we thought was the ultimate tyrrany of the church of England and its pope, the king. Such an evil cannot be eradicated by relieving the king of his head, it can only be starved to death by abandonment and shunning. And in a new land survival is also a matter of food and hence regardless of what one is educated to do and be, tilling the land and bringing forth sustenance is both a necessity and a glorification. Hence the idea that a man who does not own land is not qualified for citizenship but is little more than the property of an evil government. Hence the form of Southron politics where men who own land but are too inept to make good use of it are bundled off to run that evilness that has the doubtful benefits of being not only ineffectual but far away. “Those who can, farm; those who cannot, teach; and those who cannot teach are sent off as politicians.” This gives us great insight into both George Wallace (and his ilk) and Martin Luther King (and his ilk.)
But a price comes with this frontier wedding, some would even say welding, to the land. Explorers like Daniel Boone and David Crockett are recalled more here as failed farmers than as men of accomplishment. Their fame is more the invention of modern society than folkways. But this can be too intense. Hence the term in the Sowth “dirt poor”, referring to people so wedded to their land that they are impoverished by it.
There are people and pieces of ground not ten miles from where I sit in Greater Metropolitan Arab where a family huddles in a shack of a house lacking plumbing, whose piped water is limited to a single tap in the kitchen, and whose electricity is limited to a couple of light fixtures with bare bulbs exchanged at times by screw-in sockets to run television or radios. The land is theirs’ so long as they can scrape up the money each year to pay the tax gestapo of the not distant enough evil government.
There is neither Every Child Left Behind nor Social Security here. The children do not attend shul regularly out of a mixture of pride in their poverty distancing them from the rich town children and a need for them to add to waste their stoop labor on gardens in their ground, ground that has been effectively destroyed by ignorance and dirt poverty. Adults work hard for wages less than minimum because they are off the map of taxation and reporting and hence open to exploitation. Influxes of Mexican peons have intensified the competitiveness of their lives. These are not people of the twentieth century, of the information revolution; rather these are people who dwell in a Malthusian jungle of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Hence our use of the term “dirty” is also a bit different from the norm. Again, the dictionary tells us that
Dirty 1. Defiled with dirt; foul; nasty; filthy; not clean or pure; serving to defile; as, dirty hands; dirty water; a dirty white. –Spenser. [1913 Webster]
but we really mean by dirty that dirt has become part of their composition and hence they have aspects or characteristics of dirt. Quite obviously this may be meant either as positive or negative. In the latter it refers to a person who has the good aspects of soil and Southron existence, of providing for family and community, a term indicating one who is honorable and productive. The negative side implies one who has descended into dirt poverty, who is a burden on himself and others who will neither change nor die, one who is actually evil in their perversity and depravity.
It is thus with some interest that I found the subject of dirty in the news feeds this week. Some of this was amusing in that I got to see how distorted the views of the traditional media are towards this subject as compared to we righteous Southrons. But a fair amount of it was disgusting in what it implied.
I find [Link] that women have dirtier desks than men. Dirtier in this case seems to be measured by the presence of microbes in/on the desk. This is blamed on women loading their desks with frilly decorations, and cosmetics and foodstuffs, all breeding grounds for microbes. My first thought is the mania people have that in a Shermanesque way “the only good microbes are dead microbes”, quite ignoring that microbes are mostly neutral or beneficial, only a few are detrimental, and an environment lacking them is dead. This is the same insanity that gives rise to hand sanitizers, manic exercise cleansers, and epidemics of killer infections.
I offer however, some alternate interpretation. The cosmetics and frills are probably accurate, and because women are paid less than men for the same responsibilities they have to work harder and have less time to order their environments in the workplace. They have these thinsg because they are more concerned with their appearance with men, which at least acknowledges that they have appearances that can be improved; most men are lost cases of ugliness. The same goes for food. Women pick at desk food; men are all devouring locusts. Offer a woman a cookie from a package and she will eat half; offer a mana cookie from a package and he will empty it of content.
But I have to admit to being gratified at finding the average desk to have 400 times more microbes than a toilet seat. That is especially important down here in the Sowth where we go thorugh twice as much toilet paper by placing strips on the seat before we descend, serene in out trust of its protecting us from STDs and worse. But what I find amazing is that keyboards have only five times as many microbes as toilet seats? [Link] This makes keyboards islands of sanitariness in the desktop (physical) sea of microbial life. But given that we all eat over out keyboards and they have the greatest density of locations for crumbs to hide, somehow my sense of trust in the reportage is violated.
