Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

Seems Legit

jerry-fake-quote

We can trust the Instagram post that gets his name and birth year wrong.

22 Comments

    • Mean, Green, Devil Eating Machine

      Thanks for the link – whatta read!

  1. Jerome Garcia

    wilbard!

    • wilbard

      The very same! I lurk around these parts and make the odd pedantic comment

  2. Buck Mulligan

    Just glad they didn’t go with that whole “choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil” thing he also said. Sounds fine in the abstract but not what I’m in the mood for today.

    • Thoughts On The Dead

      Do yourself a favor and do not search #jerrygarcia on Instagram. That quote is every third fucking post.

  3. Deadbass36

    Gerry! Gerry! Gerry! (pronounced with hard G sound to make it funny)

  4. SmokingLeather

    I guess people were tired of choosing the lesser of two evils.

  5. Mulebyrd

    it all seems to come full circle. miss you gerry

  6. PaulCHebert

    Reminds me that there are some painful-to-read old interviews with Garcia in which he uses the word “spade” a few times too often.

    • mikemj

      Revisionist history here, Paul. I would say that at the time “spade” was not meant to be a pejorative term, more a “hip” way of addressing someone we might now days call a “brother.”

      • PaulCHebert

        “Wolfgang Mieder notes that in the fourth edition of The American Language,* H.L. Mencken’s famous book about language in the United States, “spade” is listed as one of the “opprobrious” names for “Negroes” (along with “Zulu,” “skunk” and many other words that I can’t print here).”

        [Published in 1921]

        http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763/is-it-racist-to-call-a-spade-a-spade

        • Mean, Green, Devil Eating Machine

          Thanks for that NPR link – it mentions several books which I will now be looking for to read.

  7. John

    Same as it ever was…

    Read the Port Huron Statement. Update a few things and stillmresonates hard.

    Resist.

  8. John

    Re: spade

    The idiom originates in the classical Greek of Plutarch’s Apophthegmata Laconica, and was introduced into the English language in 1542 in Nicolas Udall’s translation of the Apophthegmes, where Erasmus had seemingly replaced Plutarch’s images of “trough” and “fig” with the more familiar “spade.” The idiom has appeared in many literary and popular works, including those of Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, W. Somerset Maugham, and Jonathan Swift.

    Often seen as “call a spade a shovel”.

    Spade as a racial pejorative is around 1928 and so people generally avoid the phrase to avoid confusion

  9. Luther Von Baconson

    desjardins

  10. mikemj

    Wow. I stand corrected, Paul. I wonder if I just assumed it was a non pejorative term because it was Jerry speaking. Or could there have been a small period of time when the term was somewhat acceptable in certain segments of society?

    • PaulCHebert

      I imagine it might be a case of what we now sometimes call “hipster racism” or “hipster sexism” — using slurs “ironically” as way to show that you’re above the hatred; you saw it in the Beats, and you used to see it in Vice magazine before it went semi-legit/semi-mainstream. It didn’t work then, it ages poorly, and it still doesn’t work now.

      I don’t think Jerry was a hater, and I imagine he cringed if he ever read those things years later.

      • Thoughts On The Dead

        I’m inclined to take this view. I think the line of thought was “I have a lot of black friends”->”my black friends use this word”->”I can use this word”

  11. heavenlypivot

    This exchange right here is (one of the many) reasons I stop by often. Yes, I laugh myself into a hiccuping stupor at the zany antics of our semi-fictional reality players, cry at your poetry, zone with Precarious (ducking when necessary), and listen to some fine GD. I will never again take lightly the solemn duty of laundry. But this is so special: civilized discourse between adults respectfully calling out errors of thinking and language, friends who kindly (and factually) offer corrections to said errors and people willing to say they are wrong. I’m blowing you all kisses right now.

    TotD – grieve, be angry, be sad. Be what you need to be right now, we can handle it. The atmosphere in any group is created by those at “the top” and you have created something rare and precious here. Keep writing, we need you more than ever. Feel the love coming back your way.

    • Dawn

      exactly!

  12. Merkin

    So what’s a great GD rarity, ’70s version, to stream this weekend and escape?

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