Tucson Weekly: 'Hymie' Heat (December 10

So What's To Apologize For?
By Jeff Smith
OVER THE YEARS I've been asked to give commencement addresses to about a half-dozen classes of high-school seniors, eighth-graders, kids on their way to becoming thinking grown-ups. Generally the response has been favorable: My extemporaneous remarks on such occasions run to the candid and blunt. Hey kids, this is the world you're walking into: challenging but entertaining.
Smith The last time out was at Rincon High School and I decided at the last minute to ramble on the subject of tolerance, goodwill and independent thinking. I started off relating a lame joke I'd heard the day before from my vet.
What do you call a Mexican with a vasectomy? A dry Martinez.
Bad joke but a good point to be made; that point being that maybe half the audience was immediately ready to get all puffed-up and offended, either out of perceived ethnic insult, or imagined violation of the dogma of political correctness.
Whereas, I pursued my point, the whole idea was an ear-joke: a simple play on the homonymic juxtaposition of a popular regional surname with a popular cocktail featuring a lot of gin and very little vermouth. The irony of our contentious, distrusting age, I went on, is that in order for one to take offense, one would have to carry within oneself the seed of a toxic weed: The notion that just uttering the word Mexican in a joking context, or a Spanish surname such as Martinez, is something decent, politically sensitive people simply do not do.
Ever know somebody so exquisitely delicate on matters of perceived ethnic sensitivity that he referred to Mexicans as Spanish? Anyway, my hostess that graduation night, the principal of Rincon High, took it upon herself to apologize--in writing--to every student and family in attendance, for my insensitivity and racism. My point could not have been better made: The principal had created ethnic issues where none had existed.
So what's this got to do with today's exercise?
Well, judging from the mail and phone calls anent my recent take-off on a local lawyer's TV ads and how they backfired on him in court, some of you still think I'm out to insult whole cultures, promote bigotry and foster a climate of hate. I hate it when that happens.
I read where Harold Hyams, the local legend of lame television commercials, was rebuffed when he tried to get a piece of a court settlement his firm had failed to obtain for a client. Based on Hyams' repetitive ad claim, "If we don't win, you don't pay," the client took her case elsewhere and won better than three times what Hyams had advised her to settle for. His chutzpah in demanding a piece of the action struck me as over-reaching; and the judge's decision that he didn't have a dime coming seemed to me justice both poetic and fiscal.
As I sat at my keyboard casting about for a hook on which to hang my column, I remembered the ad man's injunction that the worst commercials can be the most effective if they worm their way, however annoyingly, into the viewer's subconscious and if they remember your name and how to spell it so they can look it up in the Yellow Pages. Any publicity is good publicity, the advertising industry contends, as long as they spell your name right.
So I employed the ironic device of painstakingly spelling every name right but Hyams'. How many ways can you misspell or miscast Harold Hyams?
Several, and one of them utilizes three out of the five letters in his last name. That name is Hymie and its use set some people's teeth on edge. They hearkened back to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's description of New York City as "Hymie town" and accused me of making an ethnic slur.
Sorry folks, but I'm not a racist, a bigot, an anti-Semite, and when you accuse me of this it pisses me off. You can call me a cripple and I will not take offense, because I am crippled. You can call me a gun nut, a loud-mouth, an uncouth and profane provocateur, and I will cheerfully agree. But I have spent too many years taking insults and threats from enemies who resented my writings in behalf of freedom, equality and mutual respect, to gladly suffer accusations from those who should be friends. More than once I have been a guest at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, to be thanked and honored for editorials on tolerance and human rights.
As a kid at University Heights Elementary School I had a friend named Hymie. His given name was Hyman: Hymie was as inevitable a nickname for him as Chuy for Jesus. It was bestowed by his family and taken up by his schoolmates. I never saw anything wrong with it.
I still don't: Jesse Jackson and Ed Koch notwithstanding.
Am I sorry about this sorry mess? Yes. I'm sorry people hate and mistrust other people without even knowing them. I've seen and heard tales of suffering and death of Jews who were doing nothing more than being Jewish, and have cried real tears over them. I do not consider this present controversy a Jewish/gentile issue: I think some people are quick to see prejudice, where a consideration of context would illuminate innocent intentions. I think we all should be grateful to live in a place where freedom of speech, of religion, of the press, affords us all--Jews and gentiles, blacks and white, Mexicans and even Spaniards--security against the sort of systematic hatred that allowed the Holocaust to happen in the more quiet, less contentious, outwardly polite Old World cultures of Europe.
If I had sat here at my computer three weeks ago, smirking over slipping by some slur in the guise of a play on words, smug in the notion that this would cut my subject in his most vulnerable spot, however cheap the shot, then I would owe an apology to everyone who read that column. But I know my own mind and that's not what went through it.
To issue a formal apology over a misunderstanding is hypocrisy of the sheerest sort. I won't apologize for something I didn't do. I didn't write an ethnic slur, I wrote a nickname that somebody else once tried to use as a slur. My old classmate Hyman, wherever he's got off to now, ought to be consulted on the question of whether his nickname is a dirty world.
And the next time I offend somebody--as most assuredly I will--pick up the phone and call me on it. Probably you'll get an 'oops, sorry' and that will resolve the issue.
For those of you who don't have a phone book, or a quarter for directory assistance, the number is 455-5667. Shalom.

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