Representative Full Stop

I have decided that henceforth and for the foreseeable future, the woman who calls herself Ocasio-Cortez and who is more descriptively titled Occasional Cortex shall be known as Representative Full Stop.

The name has its origin here: “My last name is Ocasio-Cortez. Full stop. That’s my name.”

I’ll first confess why this nonsense irritated me: When she says things like “No, you can’t say ‘Cortez.’ I’ve never used that in my life. ‘Cortez’ is referring to someone else. Even if they‘re trying to be rude + wrong, my dad’s last name was Ocasio anyway. (His name was hyphenated too, though.)” She’s assuming that we give a good g*dd*mn what her dad’s name was.

Most of us are aware that Spaniards have their mother’s surname last. It’s a cute habit that has bitten me in the butt because the Portuguese don’t do that. And yet, proto-politically-correct people in Ohio in 1981 assumed so and assume they were gratifying me by handing me a diploma that has Silva as my surname. Look, Representative Full Stop, we don’t care. You’re an American, born in America. You have the arrant presumption of thinking you can serve as a representative for Americans, but you wish to hold onto to this nonsense that your surname is not your surname because it wasn’t your dad’s name? Pick a surname, your mother’s or your fathers, and make it your surname. We don’t care which. Resolve it between the two still-functioning brain cells in your otherwise empty head.

Yeah, sure people have the right to have hyphenated surnames and dual surnames. And most people will try to accommodate them, and that’s fine, but in the end, it’s like trying to accommodate people’s chosen pronouns. We do it because we’re nice people and we try to be polite.  But you don’t have the right to demand that people address you in a certain way.  That’s compelled speech, and you can’t make us. You’re impinging upon our First Amendment rights and our right to tell you to take a hike. If what we call you is an insult — like, say, Occasional Cortex — you can be offended.  And you can call us names back.  But just because someone forgot your double-barrel hyphenated moniker, you don’t have the right to dictate to us that this is your name “full stop.” Oh, yeah? You and what army, Representative Full Stop?  Come to my street and make me.

Having grown up in a Latin country, I KNOW what a double-barreled last name means.  It means you’re from a “good family” and you’re “someone.” Representative Full Stop will just have to learn that we’re Americans. We’re all someone, our families are all good, and we don’t have superiors.  The bastards ain’t been born.

She thinks we call her Cortez because we want to be rude. Ah! Representative Full Stop has absolutely no idea how rude we can be. My circles delight in coming up with rude, ridiculous and apt nicknames for her. Chiquita Guevara, Occasional Cortex, Che Dumbara. That’s rude. Forgetting your double-barreled self-important moniker is not being rude. It’s a slip of the tongue and frankly not caring enough about you to make sure you are always happy with the way you’re addressed. And that’s not rude. That’s putting you in your place. Boss though you might imagine yourself, you’re not that important. You’re another miss-educated product of what passes for excellent schools in the U.S., with your mind filled with crazy socialist nonsense and no ability to do anything productive ever.

But Sarah, you’ll say, making up ridiculous names for her is mean, it’s not civil and it makes us as bad as them.

Are you kidding me? This woman wants to institute a regime that would have you in chains if not dead, and that would allow her descendants to lord it over your descendants, like Whoa Fat Lords it over North Korea. And you think making up funny names for her is mean and “just like them?” You must be kidding me.

Look, I read someone saying we shouldn’t mock her because we need to take her seriously as a threat. (The Bookworm Room.  Excellent blog.) And I get where the author is coming from, but like all smart people she’s sometimes wrong, and she’s wrong on this one.

Sure, we should take the threat of socialism and communism seriously. We should debunk it on a deep and thoughtful level.

But we should not treat their instrument, sent forth to try to break our system, as some kind of serious intellectual, or even, as I’ve heard Representative Full Stop called, “energetic and full of potential” or some other idiocy.

We did that with Obama, a man who couldn’t string two words together without a teleprompter, and what did it get us? Nothing. It got the establishment confirmed in their idea that he was “very smart” and “a deep thinker.”

Most of the “intellectual establishment” and the artificers of public discourse are not themselves smart at any level.  What they are in fact is good at reading social capital.

And up till now, signaling left and parroting their atrocious pap has been good political capital. It’s socially aspirational, which is why all the tech millionaires do it, one after the other.

Do you know why? Because they call us stupid and mock us, often incoherently Anyone remember Romney’s women in binders? (Yes, I take your point, Romney probably isn’t right-wing. BUT he was representing the right wing in that case). And we are very polite to them and treat them as though their ceremonial degrees, handed out by other leftists, for parroting the right words, are some kind of mental feat. So if you signal left, everyone treats you like you’re not ridiculous. Gee, I wonder what I’d choose if I were politically unattached.

Do you like losing the culture? Are you committed to handing future generations to the left by default?  Are you absolutely sure the best possible thing would be for the narrative of the left to become universal?

No? Then start making fun of them. Every chance you get, you push their nose in. You make them so ridiculous that even the left is ashamed to count these total idiots in their number.

And frankly, there are few more idiotic than Representative Full Stop.

At least we hope she lives up to her new name and there are no more after them. I mean, having brought forth the Capo de tutti Idioti, what could the left do for an encore?

Point and laugh and call them on their crazy. The culture war is won ROFL.