Opinion: So easy even a politician can do it
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It’s been a rough few weeks for the world’s Pygmies.
First, during the recent Festival of Pan-African Music in the Republic of Congo, host officials housed a group of diminutive Pygmy musicians in the cages at the Brazzaville zoo, while other performing delegates got air-conditioned hotel rooms. Officials explained it was not discrimination; they just thought the group of 20 jungle natives would feel more at home amid the trees and animals.
But worse than that for the world’s Pygmy people, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently called the nine-man field of fellow Republicans running for president a ‘bunch’ of ‘pygmies.’ Can you imagine the insult if Pygmies ever heard about it?
Gingrich said it last week at one of those regular Washington breakfasts where hurried journalists looking for a free meal and some quotes gather with someone who desperately wants to be quoted. It’s a symbiotic relationship, like those blackbirds that pick insects off the backs of rhinos.
Gingrich, a leading critic of President Clinton as an adulterer at a time when Gingrich himself was one, is always ready with a quote, sometimes intelligent, usually sharp-tongued, always self-promoting. Recently, he’s been trying to stay in the news because on some days he hints he might join the field of Pygmies seeking to lead a nation of non-Pygmies and on other days it’s beneath him. On humid summer days in Washington with Congress about to go on vacation, such vacillations can pass for news.
Always thorough, we did a little research into the aptness of the former speaker’s remarks and...
we found in a Google search lasting 0.12 seconds that when you type in Pygmies and Republicans, you get 92,700 references. The list starts with the Gingrich quote and usually involves someone calling someone else like Al Gore, George W. Bush, Dennis Kucinich, Kim Jong Il, et al. a ‘political Pygmy,’ ‘an intellectual Pygmy,’ or other kinds of derogatory references to puny people.
Apparently, the ACLU has been asleep a while and not leapt to the defense against discrimination of several bands of central African peoples who average 4-foot-11 in height. The word Pygmy derives from the Greek Pygmaioi and Latin Pygmaei, which was literally a measurement of length between the elbow and knuckles used to describe small people. The Greek poet Homer first described Pygmies in the 8th century B.C. as a tribe of dwarfs reputed to live in Ethiopia.
One widely-held belief is that Pygmies are direct descendants of Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers. They did not evolve into the modern-day because of their isolation and poor TV reception. Today, Pygmies still don’t have a rubber chicken banquet circuit but instead hunt small animals like monkeys and wild pigs, also consuming fruits and insects like caterpillars, snails and termites not often found at fundraisers.
They live in small tribes where everyone has a job and all food is shared. They’re so primitive they have no written laws or tax codes. A police force is not necessary. Pygmies rarely reach age 50, have a high infant mortality and are widely discriminated against as sub-human by many governments. Even when a certain American car insurance company sought a species to mock that would not then sue, it rejected Pygmies and went with cavemen.
‘I see the former member of the House of Representatives,’ said Sen. John McCain, one of the alleged campaigning Pygmies, ‘as a person who has many, many comments to make and he’s made many, many comments critical of me.’ McCain added, ‘If Mr. Gingrich decides he wants to get into the presidential campaign for the nomination of our party, then I would take some of his comments more seriously.’
By the way, a Google search for Pygmy and Democrats took only 0.11 seconds and found 60,000 references, with much the same results, members of one political party calling members of another a Pygmy of some sort. Each speaker no doubt thought they were being original.
Interestingly, because of their need to get along with each other in a cooperative tribal society, Pygmies are not known to have an unpleasant word that makes fun of tall humans with bulging bellies who live in smog-clogged valleys, wearing strange scents to mask their odor and calling each other derogatory names every four years. But maybe someday progress will reach their humble huts of grass.
--Andrew Malcolm