I am listening to the Dennis Miller
radio show. I am a big fan of Dennis Miller. He is brilliant. No one can
summon a metaphor like Miller can. He turns speech into an Olympic event.
Miller read the text for an advertisement. Apparently former Polish President Lech Walesa will be making an appearance in America soon. The text listed all of Walesa's achievements. Walesa, Miller said defeated communism, won the Nobel Prize, was elected Poland's president ... something like that. I don't remember the exact text.
After listing Walesa's many achievements, Miller closed this way, "And now Walesa devotes his time to screwing in light bulbs."
Miller's allusion is to two forms familiar to Americans: the Polak joke, and the light bulb joke. These jokes communicate how crude Polaks are. How many Polaks does it take to screw in a light bulb? Ten: one to hold the light bulb and nine to rotate his ladder.
Here is an excerpt from the talk I recently gave in Wisconsin:
Bieganski is not just pervasive. He is inescapable. He is required. If you mention Polish identity in any number of venues: a college classroom, a party, a political speech, a film, a discussion of poetry – if it is a lower strata venue, you make a Polak joke. If it is a higher strata venue, you invoke Bieganski. In American culture any mention of Polish identity is followed by Bieganski. It is obligatory.
Dennis Miller, a talented man I great admire, just demonstrated this axiom from my talk.
My facebook friend's friends did the same.
If you mention Polish identity in America, you must then make a joke. If that doesn't fly, you bring up Poles' responsibility for hate and atrocity. There are examples of this pattern in the book.
BTW, Dennis Miller is a right-wing Catholic. I don't agree with those who argue that the Bieganski stereotype is limited to left-wingers and Jews. It is found across ethnicities and political positions. It is standard. It is a formulaic speech pattern.
It is up to Polonia to change this. Start with the three part blog post on the Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision.
Miller read the text for an advertisement. Apparently former Polish President Lech Walesa will be making an appearance in America soon. The text listed all of Walesa's achievements. Walesa, Miller said defeated communism, won the Nobel Prize, was elected Poland's president ... something like that. I don't remember the exact text.
After listing Walesa's many achievements, Miller closed this way, "And now Walesa devotes his time to screwing in light bulbs."
Miller's allusion is to two forms familiar to Americans: the Polak joke, and the light bulb joke. These jokes communicate how crude Polaks are. How many Polaks does it take to screw in a light bulb? Ten: one to hold the light bulb and nine to rotate his ladder.
Here is an excerpt from the talk I recently gave in Wisconsin:
Bieganski is not just pervasive. He is inescapable. He is required. If you mention Polish identity in any number of venues: a college classroom, a party, a political speech, a film, a discussion of poetry – if it is a lower strata venue, you make a Polak joke. If it is a higher strata venue, you invoke Bieganski. In American culture any mention of Polish identity is followed by Bieganski. It is obligatory.
Dennis Miller, a talented man I great admire, just demonstrated this axiom from my talk.
My facebook friend's friends did the same.
If you mention Polish identity in America, you must then make a joke. If that doesn't fly, you bring up Poles' responsibility for hate and atrocity. There are examples of this pattern in the book.
BTW, Dennis Miller is a right-wing Catholic. I don't agree with those who argue that the Bieganski stereotype is limited to left-wingers and Jews. It is found across ethnicities and political positions. It is standard. It is a formulaic speech pattern.
It is up to Polonia to change this. Start with the three part blog post on the Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision.
Overlooking the insult, I think that I would answer back, half-seriously, "Lech Walesa was an electrician. He could teach Dennis Miller a thing or two about screwing-in light bulbs, not to mention electricity-related technicalities beyond Miller's mentality."
ReplyDeleteUp until now I used to like Dennis Miller. I thought he grew up from telling these old 1960's/1970's anti-Polish hate jokes. Now I think Miller is just another anti-Polish MEDIA Bigot and I've lost a lot of respect for him.
ReplyDeleteAs Leonard Jarzab of the Polish American Guardian Society has said over the past 4 decades, these "Polish Jokes" basically are American media jokes mostly pushed mostly by NBC-TV starting with George Schlatter's "Laugh-In" not to mention were also present in many other NBC-TV shows like the "Tonight Show" (especially in the 1970's), the old "Conan OBrian show", The John Laroquette show", etc. In the old NBC-TV show "LA Law" the Polish Character was portrayed as being mentally retarded.
As the Polish American Guardian Society has said, its no coincidence that the word "Polish" or "Poland" as been ridiculed on NBC-TV shows, because it was meant to CONDITION the American viewer to have the same anti-Polish prejudice that the NBC-TV upper management have.
Then you have not long ago where Seth Meyers NBC-TV's Saturday Night Live (about a year ago) MOCKED a POSITIVE STORY of a hero Polish Pilot who saved hundreds of lives with anti-Polish hate joke slurs.
About a year before that, NBC-TV's Seth Meyers mocked a book about Christopher Columbus being half Polish. Once again, Polish people were not doing anything negative, yet this NBC-TV anti-Polish Bigot Seth Meyers was BASHING Polish people with anti-Polish Hate Jokes. Back in 2008, Seth Meyers' NBC-TV predecessor Amy Poehler was mocking Poland for wanting to upgrade its military forces.
Maybe its about time we Polish Americans go in front of these anti-Polish Media Bigot's houses and get in their faces and tell them some jokes about what anti-Polish Bigots they are??
The most disgusting thing is that these subhuman intelligence jokes about Polish people is that they ORIGINATED from Nazi propaganda, starting with the Nazi German BIG LIE about "Polish Calvary charging German tanks". These anti-Polish jokes are also in the 2 speeches Hitler gave after he invaded Poland.
These Nazi subhuman intelligence jokes about Polish people were RENAMED "Polish jokes" by Hollywood and NBC-TV when they introduced these hate jokes into the US in the 1960's. How ironic, since Hollywood and the American media are supposed to be against the Nazis.
Evidently American Media people like Dennis Miller, Seth Meyers and other anti-Polish Bigots hate Nazi propaganda, but not when its against Polish people.