This Week In The Dream Antilles

Well, well, well. And tut, tut, tut. Your Bloguero feels ever so sweetly but wrongly chastened by a Maddow Blog article by Kent Jones on November 9. A taste of this article about referring to one’s self in the third person, if you really insist on it:

That word is illeism. The act of referring to oneself (often habitually) in the third person.

According to Wikipedia, illeism has a variety of uses including self-promotion, to give the speaker lofty airs, to illustrate the feeling of being outside one's body and watching things happen, as a form of sarcasm or as a way to show dim wittedness, such as when the Mongo in Blazing Saddles declares: "Mongo only pawn in game of life."
So why does someone become an illeist? According to Yahoo answers:

Because when you do that it makes you feel like you're not so alone. It's a psychological way of making yourself feel like there's someone with you, even if it is only yourself. He was probably picked on as a child, that usually being the cause for this behavior. On the other hand if he's doing this in a joking fashion, its just that, a joke.

Aha! it could be a joke. That backs up Rachel's Herman Cain is a Performance Artist theory.

Wait a second. Wait one forking second. On this pop psychologizing and its implicit fault finding of your Bloguero and negative judgments about him, your Bloguero, who almost always refers to himself in the third person in these Friday posts, calls, to adopt one of Maddow’s pet phrases, “Bull pucky.” That’s right. Bull. Forking. Pucky. Bull Pucky, you hear? Bull pucky. Bull pucky. Bull pucky.

Let’s look at the facts.

Is your Bloguero trying self promotion in this post? Right, like your Bloguero is the Deion Saunders of the small blogs, on some of which his Friday posts get, oh wait for it, two, count them readers, count them, two reccs. Or giving himself lofty airs? Right, like your Bloguero is some kind of authority on something or claims to be? Seriously. The only thing your Bloguero is an authority on or has even claimed authority about are his own multifaceted idiosyncrasies. And those, to his sincere regret, are many, but he knows them intimately. Or, did you check this out? Your Bloguero is outside his body? As if he were Emanuel or some other channeled, discorporate being? Not so. Totally untrue. Your Bloguero is living in his body as he types this out. His fingers are cold. One does not have cold fingers unless one has a body. QED. And is your Bloguero sarcastic? OK, ok, ok, ok. Well, all right. Sometimes he’s sarcastic even when he uses the first person. If you grew up in Newark like your Bloguero and spent some of your waking hours at the local courthouses observing what passes for justice in America, you’d be sarcastic, too. You might even be more than sarcastic. You might be postal. Not your Bloguero. Your Bloguero is a pacifist of sorts.

Look, you don’t have to write in the third person to be disillusioned and to lash out in sarcasm or rolling eyes or making faces. C’mon, admit it. And is your Bloguero, heaven forefend, dimwitted? One, even if that one is solely your Bloguero, hopes not. What an insult.

And then there’s the hardest question. How can you even ask it? Is referring to one’s self some kind of joke? Is this a joke? Is your Bloguero making a joke? Your Bloguero takes umbrage at the suggestion. And also a double martini. With two olives. It’s not a joke. No joke. It’s life itself. If life’s a joke, it’s not your Bloguero’s fault.

No. Why does your Bloguero have to explain himself to smart people like Rachel Maddow and Kent Jones? Look. Writing in the third person at its very worst is a pose taken by the eccentric (there’s that word again), offbeat narrator of these Friday post. That’s who shows up every Friday. The Bloguero. That’s who’s been showing up every single Friday since February with this digest. If you were Deepak Chopra you’d note this bizarre, quantum equivalence:

weekly digest = the Bloguero

.

Anybody who thinks this is wrong, or a problem, or weak physics, or has some other wisecracks or criticism about it, just raise your hand. Go right ahead. Raise you hand. Right now. Your Bloguero will now ignore all that snickering and the waving hand too. Nobody, including especially your Bloguero, has to put up with these indiscreet, prying inquiries. The idea of asking for an explanation. Humpf.

This Week In The Dream Antilles is usually a weekly digest. Sometimes, like now and for several of the past weeks, it isn't actually a digest of essays posted at The Dream Antilles. For that you have to visit The Dream Antilles.