The New Pitting of ScumPup

The BBQ Pit
1

This was my post:

This was Scumpup’s response:

Can’t fault Scum’s generosity. He’s certainly generous: a two-fer. He calls me a liar and he insults my family. (A three-fer really- he also insults my writing- but about that I don’t give a fuck; the others I find a tad more offensive.)

So Friend Scumpup (and by friend I mean 'less dear to me than a rancid piece of the smegma of a recently gang-raped-by-Hell’s-Angel’s Circus Freak) implies I embellish (and by embellish I mean “lie”).

Well, I’ll admit the first part’s right. I do embellish. Guilty.

I do not make things up out of thin air, however. Every story I’ve told on these boards or elsewhere is in fact based on, well, fact, and on actual events. Invariably, and there are people who can attest to this, the most absurd and unrealistic elements of my stories are NEVER the embellished parts. (You really don’t need to embellish an old woman’s ass hanging out the window as she reenacts her 90 year old dead neighbor’s felonious activities or her lobotomized sister peeing on the ground while she does it, but the embellishment comes in with dialogue that I reconstruct and perhaps make funnier than it was [without losing the character] or that in fact, I’ll hear confess, she actually re-enacted her neighbor’s crimes about a week after the day we learned of her sympathy Christmas card letter of accusation- it’s simply easier and more interesting reading to go ahead and let them flow together, and the dialogue sets the mood and builds the character a bit better while not really detracting from the truth value.) But yes, guilty, I do embellish.

Oh, wait… he didn’t use the word embellish, did he? That’s my word. He said “horse shit”. That… well, I take that to mean “Sampiro is a liar”- is that just me? Is that a fair assessment? If I said that something you wrote or said was horse shit- you’d think I was calling you a liar wouldn’t you? Yes? Bueller? Bueller? Okay then, it’s not just me.

So Scumpup, prior to insulting my dying mother (which is really really really really really really realllllllllly not a good idea- I know that I hide it well and remain all poker faced about it, but I’m a bit touchy on that subject), says I am a liar.

Now he does not say what specifically he is calling a lie, whether it is the whole of my posts or just a part. I count seven parts to that post, those being:

  1. That I have a friend.

  2. That this friend was born in Alabama but moved to Detroit for a few years in the 1970s (1976-1980 to be precise, when he was from 8 to 12 years old, for I emailed tonight to ask him, and here there is one inaccuracy and that I’ll get to).

  3. That this friend was accustomed to addressing older women as “ma’am”.

  4. That a teacher in Detroit took offense at being called ma’am (she thought he was mocking her).

  5. That a teacher slapped him.

  6. That his mother called the teacher and threatened her with bodily harm.

  7. That the teacher apologized and did not seek action against the mother.

So, let’s examine these individually then.

  1. I don’t think Scumpup really doubts I have friends. Do you? No, I don’t think so either. Let’s move on then.

  2. Now here is where I inadvertently did not tell the truth, and I’ll admit it.

It turns out that my friend, “Tyler”, lived not in Detroit, but in Waterford MI. It’s a working class bedroom community about 30 miles away. His stepfather, who married his mother when he was in ordnance at a local AFB, took a job for a defense contractor there when he left the service and his wife and stepkids went with him. They came back when their mother divorced.

So it was METRO Detroit, not actually Detroit. Personally I don’t think this greatly detracts from the truth value, and I don’t think it’s what Scum was complaining about, so I won’t beat myself up over it, just this once.

So surely Scum isn’t suggesting it’s impossible/illegal/unlikely that somebody can move from Alabama to Michigan. In fact more Alabamians have probably moved to Michigan than to any other state (almost every black family and many white families down here have a MI branch of the family, the descendants of relatives who moved there looking for work in the auto factories over the last century) or that I have a friend.

  1. Most southern children Tyler’s age were reared to address adults as “ma’am” and “sir”. Many still are. Practically all middle class or better kids older than Tyler (who is about 38) were brought up with this custom. I won’t provide a cite, but there are ample Dopers who can attest to it. I don’t think this is in dispute.

  2. There are women who do not like being called ma’am. Googling “ma’am and offensive” or “ma’am and considered and offense” and a few others will produce some web sites, but there are Dopers who attest to this cultural difference based phenomenon as well.

With some women, such as my most recent boss, it was because it makes them feel old. A 30-something professor Pennsylvania born lit professor I know has an odd reason: she feels it “reeks of a society in which parents let maids raise their children”; whatever. Some feel it’s antiquated, others that it’s shallow and for show.

According to my friend Tyler, with his teacher it was in large part racial. Tyler had/has a thick southern drawl, one of the slow variety (though he’s certainly not a slow person). Tyler was one of two white kids in his class, and his teacher was from the deep South but had left it for Michigan before the Civil Rights era- she did not have good memories of it. When Tyler called her ma’am in his slow drawl (this is his perception and that of his mother) she accused him of being mocking and disrespectful.

My conjecture (I have no way of knowing this) is that perhaps his voice and the word ma’am brought back some bitter memory. Perhaps she had only known white people to refer to black women as ‘ma’am’ in a derogatory way. Perhaps her father was killed by a palindrome. Whatever the case, she didn’t like it.

I cannot provide a cite for this- it seems that Tyler’s teacher not liking to be called ma’am is simply at this time ungoogleable. But Tyler sent an e-mail and can be deposed if you like. About that more later.

  1. The teacher slapped Tyler.

Alright… this comes a bit harder to believe for Scum, I’m guessing, but I honestly can’t think why. TEACHERS HIT STUDENTS. It happens. Google it. Teachers are human and humans can do stupid and incredibly thoughtless things. I’ve heard teachers make racist, homophobic, sectarian, etc. comments from the elementary to the collegiate level. I had a high school teacher in a public school who made students pray when they were paddled even though even in rural Alabama in the 1980s it violated state and federal law. A boy in Troy AL a few years ago was forced to bow his head during a Christian prayer even though his family was Jewish (google it- the ACLU took his case), Mary Kay Letourneau and Pamela Smart are but two teachers who got famous for having sex with students- there are no doubt far more who didn’t get the notoriety.

Teachers are professionals but not all professionals are professional. Some let their personal problems and or their stress level and or their temper problems and or their private longings/prejudices/superstitions/whatever interfere with their work and do things they shouldn’t. There’s a headline on some aspect of this everyday.

Is it hard to believe that in a classroom in a working class suburb of Detroit 30 years ago one day a teacher who had perhaps had a terrible day/week/life lost her temper and slapped one of her students for a perceived offense? It is not for me. It does not even make the teacher a terrible person necessarily- it makes the teacher a person whose judgment was extremely poor in one regrettable instance. Is there anybody here who has never had a moment of terrible judgment or a time where for a few seconds your temper made you act very inappropriately? Is this hard for most people to believe?

  1. Scum surely doesn’t doubt that a mother whose child has been slapped is capable of making a threat, does he? Lionesses and Chihuahuas and even goats and cows and rabbits will make threatening sounds and gestures if their young are threatened. Does Scum think humans are less protective of their offspring than mammals who have no opposable thumbs?
    The instinct to protect the young from predators is probably surpassed only by the sex drive and the need to feed. It’s why we find babies adorable and child abusers contemptible. We’re animals- we protect our young, and just because we evolved into people who can create message boards and Rubik’s cubes and legal “proper channels” doesn’t mean we’re going to use them when we’re pissed any more than all teachers are all professional at all times in all places.
    Tyler’s mother, “Ms. Hailey”, called the teacher at home when Tyler told her what had happened. She still remembers this very well. She cursed the teacher and threatened her with physical violence if she ever touched her son again. I’m not the only Doper I’m sure who can say “My mother would have done the same thing”. What exactly is hard to believe about this?

  2. The teacher acquiesced and apologized and never filed a complaint against Ms. Hailey.

This, to me, is the easiest to understand of all. The teacher almost certainly knew she was in the wrong. She probably knew it the nanosecond her hand made contact. She knew that if she filed a complaint agains Ms. Hailey then the incident would be investigated and that it would turn out, with witnesses, that she slapped a student.
Ms. Hailey was a housewife and mother with no criminal record. How hard do you suppose they’d have thrown the book a woman for threatening a teacher who struck her child? Leavenworth would probably never happen, and it’s equally likely she would not have been fired from her job as housewife and mother. The teacher could VERY WELL have been fired from her job.
You’re a teacher. You’ve got years invested in your career, you know how many years away you are from retirement. One day you’re very stressed out, a student says something that completely rubs you the wrong way and, on edge anyway, you lose your temper. Before you know it you slap him, and you instantly regret it and you hope and pray it’ll go away.
Later the child’s mother calls and curses you out and threatens you if you touch her child again. Not only do you know that legally you are in the wrong, but on some level you probably even sincerely regret what you did. You stand to lose on hell of a lot more from a big deal being made from the incident than the mother: you could lose your career, your retirement, your status in the community, you might have to move 40 miles away to work at a school you did not want to work at to begin with…
would you

A: Scream bloody murder and insist on the incident being investigated?
B: Take your ass chewing and apologize and be glad that your entire world didn’t get rearranged for a five second lapse of reason?

Most people would probably choose B. Perhaps Scum disagrees and this is why he called me a liar and insulted my mother. Whatever the case, he really shouldn’t have for, I’ll be honest- just between me and you (yes, just you, I’m not talking to the Other Dopers, just you dear reader), I was offended and a bit pissed.

2

I can provide the name of the student, his mother, the school and the teacher and sworn statements this happened. I know the people involved (not the teacher, but mother and son) and they are not prone to exaggeration or lies.

3

Please don’t take this as a dig at you, Sampiro, but you’ve expended way more energy on this than it deserves. Not because of the nature of the insults, but because Scumpup is an aggressively assholic poster who revels in being nasty and rarely misses a chance to take a swipe at someone. You might as well pit the mongrel who dumps the shitpile you happen to step in.

4

I agree with EddyTeddyFreddy - that asshole isn’t worth your time. His timing is impeccable, though - he really knows how to hit a guy when he’s down.

Having watched my five foot tall mother lift my six foot tall uncle out of bed by his t-shirt when she discovered he had beaten me from my ankles to my neck, there is no doubt in my mind what a mother will do in defense of her young. When mother told that SOB if he ever laid another hand on me she would kill him, not only did I believe her - he believed her.

But of course I’m sure that’s 24k bullshit, too.

5

Hmm… growing up in a small town 30 miles outside of an industrial city in the Great Lakes in the 1970s. Yeah, I’m drawing a blank. I got no idea what that would be like.

Sorry not even a damn Yankee slaps a child for calling his teacher ma’am. It was what we were taught to do. It wouldn’t matter if he was Gomer fucking Pyle, no teacher would even notice the ma’am part. That is bullshit. Now if the child said, “I just took a whiz in your desk drawer, ma’am,” he might get slapped. Again, someone is fibbing.

6

I hope things get better in your life real soon, Sampiro. You deserve it.

7

Apologies- premature posting. It happens after a certain age.

I can provide the name of the student, his mother, the school and the teacher and sworn statements this happened. It is not embellished on my end certainly; I don’t embellish the stories of other people’s experiences that I didn’t witness.

But then you didn’t say it was embellished, you said it was horse shit, i.e. that I lied.
You did not say “IN MY OPINION you are a liar”, or “I don’t think this really happened”, or anything to that effect, you said I am a liar.

Well sir, you are not stating an opinion but making an assertion, a very rude one at that, and the ruder the assertion the more one should be absolutely sure of the unassailability of ones position. As I said, I am able to PROVE, or at very least present much evidence, through testimony of reliable witnesses, that this happened. What can you produce to prove that it did not happen or, more to the point, how do you prove I am a liar?

Do you know “Tyler”? Are you the griot/mentat of the Detroit/Waterford area public schools, a walking depository of all information regarding incidents between students and teachers in the 1970s? What credentials do you bring other than a hunch, and for a hunch, why do you not qualify it? “In my opinion you’re lying” is a hell of a lot less damning than the outright allegation. By calling me a liar, in terms unqualified and unmistakable as to meaning and intent, you have not just insulted me, you motherfucking nimrod, you have legally libelled me.

And then you insult my mother. My, just to be melodramatic, my painfully dying mother.

So, do I care why you think of me or my honesty? Fuck No. But in insulting my family you crossed a fucking line you mother-fucking worthless piece of pig-cum guzzling-circus geek.

There is an anthropological term that if you are not familiar with, perhaps you should be. It is called “Scot’s Love” or “Complementary Opposition”. They are pretty much the same thing.

The former name derives from the Highland clans of Scotland who hacked and warred among themselves with regularity and enthusiasm. However, if the English invaded the same clans would stand shoulder to shoulder in unity against them. The man to my left may have killed my father, but I have totally got his back in this battle against the English dogs. The man I just gave orders to is one whose left eye I took out three years ago and he’s doing what I ask, and we’ll fight again and either one of us may prove the death of the other, but against a common foe we are here united. Or put in more vulgar parlance such as your own, I can call my sister or my mother a fucked up individual and mean it, but if an outsider says the same thing I will gladly tear off his poodle fellating head, piss in his still moving mouth and take a shit on his exposed spinal column before his eyes go dim and when I finish I will kick said polluted severed head in a field goal through said poodle fellating motherfucker’s own grandmother’s kitchen window and I will do it all while smiling broadly and singing a medley from CABARET. I have the right to criticize them, I love them, you are nothing to me, don’t fucking dare go there and this goes for everybody on these boards.

Ban me for saying that or not, I honestly don’t care. I quite assure you I’ll live. But I’ve had it with snarkers and their harassing emails and this one most definitely started on THIS board.

Now, do I pit my family? Yes I do. More frequently than I might should one could argue, but pit them I do. At their worst my mother and my sister are impossible viragos. But they are not always at their worst and neither do I only mention their worst when I post about them.

I urge anybody who doubts me to to search my posts. I have several times sharply corrected anybody who called us dysfunctional. I have never once portrayed any relative I have, even on occasions when I was furious with them, as all evil or all bad. They are, to me and to others, occasionally blindingly frustrating but always interesting and very productive people. And when they have been at their worst, it is to me, not to you, it is my place to say they are fucked up or not fucked up because whatever I may say about them or however much I may even despise one or more of them upon occasion above all is unconditional love and respect for each and every one of them. They are my family.

I have posted that my sister is an unbelievably illogical and narrow minded aliterate Fundamentalist who can be incredibly selfish or self-deluded. That is absolutely true. The following things are also true about my sister, and I have posted them all on these boards:

*She graduated valedictorian from one of the most prestigious college prep high schools in the state. So did my brother, for that matter (same school).
*She graduated with honors from one of the most respected pharmacy schools in the nation. So did my brother. (My brother, incidentally, is also the father of a daughter who was accepted to Harvard at 17.)
*My sister spent years selflessly nursing her bitter and unappreciative mother-in-law through a very long final illness. That too I have posted here.
*My sister is a self-made multimillionaire with an incredible work ethic and razor sharp business sense.
*My sister has donated a fortune in cash and pharmaceutical supplies and services to charities and individuals. She has bought cars and trailers for indigent people she likes even though she disagrees with their lifestyle. She recently bought a van and a trailer for a family dispossessed by Katrina. (The last I have not posted here but only because it just happened; the rest I have.)
*She has paid for the funerals of people who died indigent in her community.

All this is true and most I have posted here.

As for my mother: she’s a bipolar former wrestler who was frequently suicidal and could be insensitively manipulative. I have also said time and time again that she could also be the most selfless and courageus of humans. All of the following things have been posted on these boards and long before, much to your amusement and those of your pals, she was officially dying. I checked them all- you can find them all in other posts:

*At the height of integration she risked her life to save two black children from being the victim of a hate crime. (Posted on these boards.)
*When she was 50, widowed, broke, deeply in debt and suicidally depressed, she still provided the constant care for a woman in her late 90s who was her dead husband’s aunt; she had no legal or ethical obligation to this woman and the woman was a HUGE burden emotionally and financially and physically, but my mother had promised her when her twin sister died that she (the aunt) would never have to go to a nursing home (my aunt had a mortal horror of them) so she stayed with us until we had no roof over our heads. My aunt’s 20 biological nieces and nephews never came around or offered to help even though they were almost all in better shape financially and emotionally than my mother and owed their existence to the old twins, but my “fucked up” mother never once made Aunt Carrie feel the least bit unwelcome even when she had reached the point of suicidal despair.
*My “fucked up” mother climbed out from under a mountain of debts and “situations no merciful god would allow” situations and worked her way through shit-jobs and low-pay no benefits position until she came back, in her 50s and 60s, stronger and better than ever, a lesson in resilience that Germany could take notes from.
*There are currently more than- this is not an exaggeration- a dozen churches praying for my mother’s health. They cover all races and social classes and at least two gods (her Muslim neighbors) and it is not because they are looking for people to pray for- my mother is actually being extremely private about her health- but the churches have congregation members who are among the armies of former students, former mental patients (yes, I get the irony), friends and co-workers who my mother has benefitted over the years and who truly love the old woman
*My mother won the highest award given to a mental health residential program in the state and she won it three years in a row. The fourth year she withdrew from eligibility. Before you scoff at the state, Alabama has one of the top rated mental health care programs in the nation (it’s one of those odd and random things they do well).
*My mother has two children who, in spite of her less than “always happy” moments, have inverted their lives to care for her. (When I realized I was not able to do my job at a research university AND take care of her AND do both well there was not a second’s hesitation as to which was my priority- I found a lesser paying job that allows me to live with her and take care of her while she’s dying, I did this not from guilt or greed (hell, she doesn’t have a very large estate and she has no will) but from love and respect but because she is a Titaness and she needs me and I shout onto the Champs d’Elysee with my deepest and loudest voice (and my voice has a depth and volume that can reach the back of any auditorium without a microphone) “La Fayette, I AM HERE”, and I am thankful I have the opportunity. She is a giantess, the last Olympian in my estimation, much sinning and much sinned against but in the end and all credits and debits figured a woman to be much admired. And if you could see her resolve of late, the fire that’s still in her- oh the cancer will win, of that I’ve no doubt, but it will be a fucking Thermopylae, not a Slaughter of the Babes- it’ll know it’s got a fight on its hands.

Another thing about my family: of all these “fucked up” people you will not find, past or present, a drug problem or a criminal record or a drain on government coffers or an unplanned pregnancy or an STD or anything of the kind on any of our records. In spite of our very real flaws and a seemingly genetic arrogance (our opinions may change from time to time but the fact we are RIGHT does not) and in spite of the genes for a bipolar disorder that to borrow a phrase from Kesselring do not so much run as gallop through my family, we are all hard-working, intelligent, contributing, well informed and productive members of society about whom most if not all who know us well or even casually would say enrich their lives by our presence in it. (Our dramas we save for our private quarters- we do not inflict them on others, and no, I do not count a message board with coded names and changed “identifying details” as inflicting them on others.)
Would God America, if not the world at large, have more “fucked up” families.

Who will quit their jobs or totally rearrange their lives to care for you should you be invalidated Scumpup? I doubt anyone.

In any case, I had more to say, but I’m tired of this subject, I’m tired of the harassing emails, I’m tired of this whole fucking board and if there’s a way of cancelling my membership please point me to it. I’ll merely end by saying that the whole of Scumpup’s miserable snarking existence is less to me than my mother’s cancer ridden shit, and that, Marjorie — just so you will know — and your children will someday know — is the night the lights went out in Georgia!

And I am not in a bipolar “wanting to fight and kill” decompensating manic phase like I was when I had my famous meltdown but rather quite lucid and even rational and not even in a particularly bad mood when I say I really do not care if I am banned or whatever. This board is not worth the hassle that it causes me from… [fill in blank]. And besides which, even in the Pit this… pathetic nothing is allowed to legally libel me, which I could really not care less about, but to insult my entire family= not generally, he meant specifically MY FAMILY, MY MOTHER- WHO HE KNOWS GOOD AND WELL IS DYING PAINFULLY AND

and he doesn’t get so much as a wrist slap.

And a thread of mine is closed because I mention “another site” that I do not even visit whose posters harass me BECAUSE OF THIS SITE.

Mods= Fuck you too.

I don’t wish you any ill will whatever, I really don’t. But at this particular moment, fuck you.
Shalom.

8

SAMPIRO. Dude. Step away from the computer. Seriously, just shut it off and go to bed. You can re-think this whole thing tomorrow.

9

Your post that you refer to still sounds like horseshit to me. And you definitely need to relax.

10

Sampiro, ETF is right. I’d be pissed off in that situation, too, but it just isn’t worth your time. Don’t get yourself upset and waste your energy on this kind of crap when you need it elsewhere. And take care of yourself.

11

Well, if Sampiro’s had his say, I vote for locking it and making it a sticky.

12

When did Scumpup insult your mother, specifically? Yeah, he said “fucked up family”, but that doesn’t single out your mom.

13

My last say on these boards at all is this:

If SCUMPUP has a shred of decency, if scumpup has a dick that’s bigger than this if, he will apologize to me here on this forum. I do not even ask an apology for the libel, only for his comment about my family and only for his participation in and encouragement of harassment against me. If he does not, he should be banned.

And with apologies for mentioning you in the same post as Scumpup’s shrivelled member,

To all who I have dealt with pleasurably on these boards, to all who I have received wonderful and thoughtful and well received emails from (and to those who I have not responded to personally I apologize sincerely- it’s simply a matter of no-time-no time at all, but I will), thank you so much. They really and truly meant a lot to me.

14

And I, too, would like to request that all posters who have insulted me also be banned.
Thank you.

Seriously, one might want to have one’s meds checked.

15

So the take-home lessons (1) are that Southerners solve problems by threatening violence and (2) we’re not allowed to notice that Sampiro’s family is fucked up (even though that’s the gist of every one of the many stories he posts).

Incidentally, in regard to your other thread, I haven’t been emailing you.

16

Sampiro, he’s so not worth it. Please, just let it go.

17

Well, nobody ever slapped me in school, for saying “ma’am” or otherwise, but I call women older than myself “ma’am” in certain contexts, and I have been (as an adolescent and adult) mocked for doing so, laughed at, told I was being sarcastic when I was not, had eyes rolled at me, or been told angrily by adult peers that I was somehow out of line or “sucking up.” So I don’t doubt that aspect of Sampiro’s narrative.

18

Okay, Sampiro, you’re talking about shit that is none of my affair. Never mind my post. We can do the North v. South thing some other time.

19

I lied (but then Scumpup established that). One more post:

Exy, you are the one person on Earth I have ever called a Worthless Faggot. You’re why people hate us. You’re to gays what Rumkowski was to Jews and the times you’re parents told you that you were nothing probably had nothing to do with your sucking cock. You willingly fraternize with people who make death threats against me and Eve and Guin and Diogenes and then… well, to each his own. Water seeks its own level.

And also- if CarnalK reads this, I owe him an apology for my meltdown weeks ago. I totally made you the puppet leader of an enemy foe.

And in parting (and this time I really will) I’ll leave with a classical line that will also serve as a gay double entendre:

I owe Asclepios a cock. Pray see it is delivered to him.

20

When did Scumpup insult your mother, specifically? Yeah, he said “fucked up family”, but that doesn’t single out your mom.