Since I am always trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent and occasionally prepared, I did not bring up this proposal on October 15, that being National Grouch Day. I did not want to rain on their parade.
Just as an aside my daughter’s birthday is the 15th of October, and while I am sure, like all of us, she can be grouchy at times, that is not how I think of her. She can be, however, very opinionated and does not hesitate to mount a soapbox if the need is there. She truly cannot help it. It is genetic. The totem pole of women before her and after her, all similarly disposed, is firmly anchored to a soapbox covered in Celtic knots, mystical symbols and images of nature. Being opinionated is not always an affliction as long as you have arrived there by a thoughtful and considered process. Indubitably, that describes my daughter’s journey.
But I stray…as being opinionated is a curmudgeonly trait. I am not sure how all these online petitions I am always hearing about work, but perhaps one needs to be got up to change National Grouch Day to National Curmudgeon Day. Now there would be the perfect marriage, my daughter’s birthday on National Curmudgeon Day, even if she is not particularly curmudgeonly. She is still young, however, and has time to correct that fault.
Yes, yes I know this is a day honoring the Muppets through the agency of Oscar the Grouch. Think about it a minute though, is calling someone a grouch a polite thing to do, especially to their face, especially so when you elevate the name calling to the national stage of a TV program? I’m a little surprised the cancel culture has not gone after Jim Henson. After all hanging the disparaging epithet of grouch on Oscar should be more than enough. Should I mention how he forced poor Oscar to live a trash can? And speaking of epithets, how political incorrect is naming a female character Miss Piggy. It strikes me as an over the top piece of misogyny. I’m all for cultural diversity, but a frog and a pig together… what would you even do with a pig that hops? Would you get warts from your pork chops? Again I stray… Miss Piggy is going to be hugely disappointed given the lack of mammalian amorous anatomy in frogs, especially so as boars are famous for being chewy, chewy tootsie rolls, sometimes taking up to 30 minutes. Somehow I thought this was a show for children.
If I really got my groove on I could go on and on about several of the other abused members of the Muppet menagerie, but I shall spare you.
So let’s do away with National Grouch Day and go with the much more elegant National Curmudgeon Day, it just has a certain ring about it. Besides curmudgeon is much more inclusive category, a grouch is just a grouch but as Jon Winokur in The Portable Curmudgeon so eloquently put it:
“Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers whose bitterness is a symptom rather than a disease. They can’t compromise their standards and can’t manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for feigned cheerfulness. Their awareness is a curse.
Perhaps curmudgeons have gotten a bad rap in the same way that the messenger is blamed for the message: They have the temerity to comment on the human condition without apology. They not only refuse to applaud mediocrity, they howl it down with morose glee. Their versions of the truth unsettle us, and we hold it against them, even though they soften it with humor. “
Without a doubt this puts curmudgeons in the aspect of role models, as people who should be looked up to, as people who should be emulated, as people enshirining a positive personality type that should be celebrated globally by a National Curmudgeon Day.
So let’s give this some serious thought to the idea, let’s change from the pejorative “grouch” to ennobling “curmudgeon”. Oscar the Curmudgeon, it sounds like he could be knighted. I can already see Miss Piggy dressed as the Queen to do so.