Everything is bad and we can't have nice things so, instead, please enjoy this long, drawn-out Twitter war between two of the least liked Republican lawmakers in America and ... um, famous actor Ron Perlman, for some reason. The pushing-off point was Florida man Rep. Matt Gaetz grunting that well, if there's going to be be kneeling during the national anthem, maybe we just shouldn't have soccer at all, you soccer meanies.
It all went downstream from there because Rep. Matt Gaetz and Sen.(!) Ted Cruz both think they are crackerjack twitterers who can easily Own Any Libs they come across. And it's not like they have day jobs, right?
Which resulted in this response. After this point the tweets mostly speak for themselves, so I'm just going to insert running commentary about other things here like my personal irritation at the lowercase "g," or whatever.
A fairly typical response on the daily twitters. But I suppose coming from someone with 900,000 followers it was a wound too deep for, sigh, the Matt Gaetzes of the world.
Woah, take that, professional actor who takes on roles and portrays often-unsavory people. (The "you played a white supremacist!" attack was an odd one from Gaetz, who—as onlookers pointed out—invited an actual, not-fictional white supremacist to be his State of the Union speech guest.
Anyhow, my problem with the lowercase "g" is that it doesn't look like an uppercase "G." It looks different depending on the font, but in all cases it has that little dangly bit dangling down there—the monkey-tail part—and the uppercase G doesn't. The uppercase G is just a C sitting down at a library table, attempting to maybe get some work done.
Ah, the if people think I am an asshole that means I am winning argument. Ha ha, I am "threatening" to you! Otherwise you would be ignoring me, the asshole!
So what's the point of having lowercase letters that look nothing like uppercase letters? Why would you even do that to people? In cases like P it is perfectly reasonable to have p: We get it, the P's little leg fell into a hole and got stuck there. It needs assistance. But G and g? Those are clearly two different letters. Get out of here with that nonsense.
Anyhow, the next Ron Perlman insult would get actual sitting-U.S.-Senator-Because-Texas Ted Cruz into the mix, for some reason.
It's a little weird that Ted Cruz wouldn't defend his wife when Donald Trump insulted her looks during a campaign, but is here willing to jump into the fray uninvited because calling Matt Gaetz ugly is a bridge too far. We get it. It's because every Republican loves Donald Trump and wants to have little Fascist Hitler Babies with him, so literally anything Donald does can be forgiven even as the same behavior from anyone else results in a right stern talking-to.
But volunteering someone else to go fight about it?
Volunteering that if you don't behave, they’re going to send Jim Jordan out to "wrestle" you?
Oh, that is … not good.
Seriously, again we see this odd Republiconservative tendency to choose the weirdest guys as their templars of supposed manliness. There's supposed alpha male Donald Trump, whose idea of "toughness" is teetering around in precarious lifts and having absolute meltdowns about even the slightest little thing, and we've got Jim Jordan, who became a Republican man-knight for the alpha male act of … covering up the sexual molestation of teen boys.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere. I don't care who it is, if it results in Ted Cruz getting the stuffing knocked out of him in a legally sanctioned setting, I'm all for it.
Anyway, my problem with G and g specifically is that we already have a perfectly good glyph for a lowercase G. We call it a schwa. Here, look at it. ə. (If you can't see that, it's because there's a worldwide anti-schwa conspiracy to hide it, but much progress has been made in recent years.)
That's pretty good, right? It looks exactly like an uppercase G, but smaller and backwards. We can say it's just temporarily backwards because it's disoriented from being inserted into our alphabet without warning. “It’s shy—just make sure it has food and water and give it its own space until it gets used to things,” we’ll tell people. Then in a decade or two, we can reverse it. Yes, I know there's already a Unicode character that would—you know what, never mind. I’m just throwing these ideas out there. If you don't like them, it's because you find my thinking "threatening" to your Hollywood worldview, you jerks.
All right, I'm sorry I called you jerks. I apologize. Things got heated, and I was very upset from having to spell "schwa" so many times in a row. Where were we? Oh, right. Ron Perlman taunting Republican lawmakers while they preen and threaten to let loose screeching man-parrot Jim Jordan. No, Republican lawmakers don't really have anything better to do right now. During a pandemic. And economic collapse. And nationwide movement against police brutality.
Also, we don't need both the letter C and the letter K. You know it, I know it, linguists know it, we all know it. One or the other has to go. We also don't need both a Matt Gaetz and a Ted Cruz, and yet here they both are anyway. Still. Again.
Uuuugh.