NOVKGRODAK, Freedonia. Mylek Dozkskrkzi, a 37-year old boiler inspector in this provincial capital of Freedonia, has thick skin, he assures this reporter as he wipes sweat from his brow while monitoring the gauges to the heating system at the Jerzi Glommo Memorial Skating Facility. Asked for proof to back up his claim, he removes one work boot and sock and offers his heel for inspection. “See,” he says proudly, “skin is hard as Formica counters in snack bar,” and just a touch confirms that he is not exaggerating.
So Dozkskrkzi rejects the claim of Zleka Millenskrible, a “poet-in-residence” from neighboring Ruritania spending a semester at Novkgrodak Polytechnic University, that he and other Freedonians are “thin-skinned” because of their reaction to her six-sonnet cycle “Rutabaga Winds,” which contains negative images of Freedonian cuisine.
As I near the border
the stench of rutabagas attacks
my nostrils, like Freedonian
henchmen stealing our flax.
runs the opening stanza of one of Millenskribles poems, and as I read it out loud to a “focus group” of Freedonian citizens, the rising tide of their anger is visible on faces reddened from this month’s planting of “Novkgrodak Sprouts,” a regional variation of Brussels sprouts that developed when the former Soviet Union used Freedonian farmland for atomic bomb tests in the 1950s.
“She is bad poet, bad!” exclaims Nanz Koeklai, a retired eel skinner, shaking her head from side to side. “She must be ‘canceled’ as you say in American United States.”
And so the war of words that has erupted in the media and academia elsewhere whereby a public figure can be “canceled”–stigmatized or even banned from public discourse–for purportedly-offensive language has reached Freedonia. The two countries have long jockeyed for position on the world stage, with Ruritania’s historic pre-eminence in postage stamp sales fading with the rise of the internet, and Freedonia vaulting into the lead with exports of WiFi passwords formed from its devilishly-complex consonant-heavy language.
The ancient enmity between the two peoples can be traced to what psychologists call “the narcissism of small differences.” “The true enemies of these two forlorn peoples are the many so-called ‘bloggers’ in developed nations who perpetrate negative images of their cultures,” says Professor Michael Russell, who analyzes the vitriolic back-and-forth between citizens of the two countries on social media. “Instead, they get upset when someone across the border compares a woman to a goat, as both peoples are inordinately proud of their goats.”
Millenskrible says she plans to stay to the end of her residency because she gave up a lucrative spot on Ruritanian Free National Television, her nation’s equivalent of the Public Broadcasting System in America. “I was regular panelist on You Can’t Say That!,” a weekly quiz show that challenges contestants to choose whether a particular utterance would get past the nation’s double-secret censorship laws. “We get complimentary tote bags, coffee mugs and mouse pads, which are highly-prized as young couple wedding gifts.”