Name-Callers Are Poopyheads
Can We Just Not?
When our son, Noah, was in eighth grade, his middle school read The Misfits, by James Howe. It’s a charming story about a group of middle-school kids who campaign to have a “No Name-Calling Week” with the slogan “Sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will break our spirit.” Noah’s school held a contest for students to write the best slogan for their own upcoming No Name-Calling Week.
My husband—who doubted that this campaign would do anything useful—jokingly suggested the following slogans: “Name-callers are poopyheads” and “Name-calling justifies physical retaliation.” Needless to say, Noah didn’t submit either of these suggestions. Unfortunately, Noah’s entry, “Every supervillain was once bullied. Do you really want to create another supervillain?” lost out to a submission that simply rephrased the original quote: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.”
We can make the weeks between now and the election more endurable if we declare a No Name-Calling Season. Yes, it’s fun to trash the other side and to ridicule the people we dislike. But there are a couple of good reasons to say no to name-calling.
It’s Beneath Us
Our family lived in New Jersey when Chris Christie was governor. There were legitimate reasons to criticize Christie, so it was disappointing that so many people I knew chose instead to sneer at his weight and his looks. We Democrats normally aspire to compassion, especially for people who are struggling with personal challenges or who are the victims of prejudice because of their appearance. We should strive to alleviate, not add to, these prejudices. (Incidentally, Christie is well aware of these insults; he has said that the relentless jokes and comments about his weight have been hurtful but have also made him tougher.)
Or here’s another example: Many people are making fun of J. D. Vance because he wears eyeliner. Maybe Vance feels insecure about his looks, and the eyeliner gives him confidence. Maybe he likes to (discreetly) let his freak flag fly. I have no idea. But can we please let the man have his eyeliner?
It’s tempting to accuse our targets of hypocrisy to justify the name-calling and personal insults. People may be dunking on Vance about his eyeliner because it seems inconsistent for Vance to wear eyeliner when he endorses Project 2025, which would, among other senseless cruelties, deny same-sex couples the right to adopt. The problem here is not the eyeliner; it’s the plan to use the power of the government to hurt gay people. That issue is where we should focus our energy and comments.
Besides, if we’re honest with ourselves, aren’t we all a little bit hypocritical, at least some of the time? We all have our petty failings and inconsistencies. Me too. I care deeply about climate change and protecting the environment, and yet I take several transatlantic flights a year so I can visit family and friends in the US. Then there’s the vegan I was friends with in college, who ate hot dogs whenever he went to Comiskey Park.1 If a public figure we dislike is a hypocrite about something minor2 like eyeliner, we would do well to remember our own weaknesses and show a little forbearance. To paraphrase the words of a wise teacher, Why do we worry about the eyeliner around our neighbor’s eyes and not the board in our own?
It’s Ineffective
Those who believe that name-calling is a good strategy need only reflect upon the past couple of weeks to be disabused of this notion. As everyone knows by now, Vance, in a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, griped that the country is being run by childless cat ladies “who want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”3 (He recently doubled down on this ugly remark in an interview with Megyn Kelly, in which he resorted to the typical dodge of bullies, saying that he was only joking.)
The entire internet has gone nuts, and the jokes, hot takes, and memes are quite amusing. For example, I get a kick out of this apt still from Alien:4
This reaction was entirely predictable. I am not a cat person, but I can’t help noticing that 46.5 million US households have cats. Seems foolish to alienate so many potential voters by suggesting that their pets make them suspect. Similarly, millions of Americans don’t have biological children but are loving parents of adopted-, foster-, and step-children. Why insult them by saying that they want to “make the rest of the country miserable”? Millions of Americans, regardless of whether they have biological children, make our country a better place through their work as teachers, medical professionals, family lawyers, and so on. A friend recently noted that Vance had even slandered “the NUNS at Catholic school! Not to mention discounting the heartbreaking pain of couples desperate for children who can’t conceive.” I think it’s safe to say that Vance’s slur backfired.
Words Don’t Have to Hurt Me
I can hear you protesting that if we unilaterally stop mocking our opponents, we will be at a disadvantage. “They’re going to keep insulting us! We have to retaliate or we will lose!” you might be thinking. But that attitude grants other people too much power over us. We don’t have to be like Benedick, who laments in Much Ado about Nothing, that Beatrice “speaks poniards, and every word stabs!” (2.1.237). The best way to blunt a sharp remark is to refuse to let it touch us.
Here’s a personal story to illustrate what I mean: One advantage of having an unusual name is that it’s hard to make fun of it. When I was in elementary school, some of my classmates went through a phase of teasing other kids about their names. Then they got to mine. They cast about for a while and eventually came up with “I’m sorry, Mari!”—followed by snickers. At the time I was a sensitive child whose feelings were easily hurt, and yet even I saw that this attempt at name-calling was pretty lame. I just laughed. It was freeing—and fun!—to react that way.
To return to my opening anecdote, the problem with that middle-school contest is not that Noah’s slogan lost (although I think it should have won). The problem is that it is simply not true that words will always hurt us. We should be teaching our kids—and ourselves—that we get to decide how we react to what other people say about us. So here’s a final story: Shortly after No Name-Calling Week at Noah’s middle school, a boy told Noah, “If I had you, Hitler, and Osama bin Laden tied up and a gun with only two bullets, I’d shoot you twice.” Instead of getting upset, Noah just burst out laughing. “Well yeah,” he said, “because Hitler and Osama bin Laden are already dead!” Took the wind right out of that kid’s sails! Laughter is power. In the weeks ahead, let’s all strive for less name-calling, sniping, and outrage, and more humor—and maybe some more cat-lady memes too.
How about you, readers? Are you in? Between now and the election, can we have No Name-Calling Season? And do you have any good stories of a time when someone called you a name and you just laughed? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
No Name-Calling Week reminds me a bit of National Brotherhood Week:
Perhaps we could all try celebrating National Brotherhood (and Sisterhood!) Week throughout the year?
Although, to be fair, this friend liked to joke that the Comiskey Park hotdogs probably didn’t contain any actual meat.
If, on the other hand, the hypocrisy is over a significant issue and could cause other people to suffer, it’s valid to point it out. I’m thinking, for example, of Herschel Walker, Georgia’s erstwhile Senate candidate, who opposed abortion rights but allegedly pushed two of his girlfriends to have abortions.
It was especially nasty that Vance included Pete Buttigieg in his list of “childless cat ladies.”
I’ll just note for the record that in the sequel, Aliens, Ripley saves the life of a little girl, Newt, and adopts her. The only mother of biological children in the movie—the alien—is a literal murderous monster. Hmmm.
I think that what teacher or admins were doing at Noah's school was exactly opposite of what they should have been doing. Here at my university, I'm starting to see in some students a sort of weaponized vulnerability: a student can get another student in trouble for some verbal "microagression" (whether or not it was intended to be provocative).
I understand the underlying good intentions to protect the vulnerable, but this is coddling and infantilizing. We are making students even more vulnerable, and inhibiting their development of an adult level of resilience. Not to mention the "language police" vibe.
I think its possible that the point of making fun of someone is often less to bring them down and more to create comradery among the people making fun. For better or worse (generally worse), making fun of people is fun. It's why people so often do it.
In the context of politics, I'm not sure the point of couch jokes about Vance are to lower people's opinion of him, so much as sort of creating a rallying cry for Democrats. There's a peice of conventional wisdom that the party having fun is winning, and this is causal, with the "having fun," helping with the winning.
Obviously this isn't justified when you are talking about school yard bullies. I do think there is some reason not to support it in politics, not because I'm concerned about Trump or Vance's feelings, but because it coarsens the culture which isn't great. However I'd probably take a somewhat coarser culture over 4 more years of Trump (who has proven adept at coarsening the culture).
It's also worth keeping in mind that this is hardly a new thing. It's the same as the British calling Napoleon short or Shakespeare (and I'm sure others) calling Richard II hunchbacked and ugly. I'm sure that it isn't just the British and it goes back much further than the 15th Century.
Even if you can justify it in the context of politics, there is probably something to be said for avoiding certain insults. Again, I'm not super concerned about hurting Christie's feelings, but if you call him fat, that does propagate the idea that being fat is bad (in a social moral sense, not just a health sense), and so other fat people are collateral damage.