(HOST) Following a weekend walk, commentator Willem Lange found himself reflecting on how many bad words he knows for vandals.
(LANGE) Some people are born to advance the fortunes of the human race and the planet, while others are dedicated to retarding them and despoiling the things they touch. I used to believe in human perfectibility. But lately I’ve given up that utopian belief. Some folks simply will never get it.
I took a walk the other day through some beautiful countryside and had it spoiled by a philistine. East Montpelier has a trail system through the forests and fields of this 32-square-mile town. There are parking pulloffs at the trailheads, a map showing the various routes, and little plastic markers to guide first-time hikers. So on a sunny afternoon I asked Mother if she’d like to trek a couple of miles. We drove the truck to our chosen trailhead. And shortly after that I began to go through all the bad names we have for lowlifes.
A few rods into the woods, we spotted the trail registration box fastened to a tree. As we approached it, we could see that some playful primate had shot at it. There were bullet holes right through the box and the logbook inside, and into the tree behind. Very upsetting. Chowderheads like that give us law-abiding gun owners a bad reputation and get land posted by its owners.
A little farther on, Mother suddenly jumped. There was a dead coyote beside the trail, a bullet hole in its shoulder, buzzing with flies. It looked so much like the dog we had recently buried, the pain of seeing it was visceral. "Why would anybody shoot it?" cried Mother.
"Some idiots shoot anything that moves. That imbecile was probably upset that it was eating the mice he was saving for Thanksgiving."
You see how easily derogatory terms scroll through our consciousness? Those last two – idiot and imbecile – are internationally recognized; they’re French. (I hear them often when I drive in France.) There are others – Dummkopf and hoodlum, from Germany; Infamato from Italy – but all fall short of describing what we feel at seeing such slack-jawed malignancy. All we can do is regret the darkness that’s fallen over an otherwise sunny day.
It’s amazing how many negative terms we possess for our fellow humans. During the great wave of Irish immigration, we called the rabble hooligans (from Houlihan); the eastern European immigrants of the Industrial Revolution were all "Hungarians"; and lately we’ve developed vicious sobriquets for immigrants from Central America and the Middle East – as if we weren’t ourselves all descendants of immigrants.
Still, spotting a mailbox smashed to smithereens, it’s hard not to think we’re going backward as a species. All we can do about those yahoos (another great epithet, from Jonathan Swift) is just keep picking up after them – I dragged the dead coyote farther into the woods – and hope that eventually our store of derogatory terms will be rivaled by a positive one. But "sweetheart" isn’t as much fun to say as "nincompoop."
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.