Sedition has a date, and it’s Aug. 13.
To a large and committed minority of your mothers and fathers, your sons and daughters, your friends and neighbors and colleagues, it’s a day to glorify the fences that divide us, to gather together in blighted person or in hostile spirit and gnaw upon imagined grievances, and to plot no end of terrible inconveniences against a greater society that has shown them only sympathy and forbearance.
Although not always readily identified individually, in generality those discreet dissidents are known by many names. In Australia they’re “mollydookers.” To Italians they’re “mancino,” a term derived from the word for “crooked.” In England alone they’re variously described as gar-pawed, cack-handed, gibble-fisted, scoochy, kay-neived, corrie-fisted, cuddy-wifted and kittaghy. But by whatever name they’re known, they all bridle at many of the simple conventions that have lifted Mankind above lesser creatures and helped our species thrive in a dangerous and indifferent world.
Aug. 13 is International Left Handers Day, and it should give every right-thinking northpaw cause to pause.
Now marking its 25th year of lateral disaffection, Left Handers Day was founded in 1991 by the Left Handers Club, a globe-spanning cabal of malcontents based in the United Kingdom and dedicated to trashing thousands of years of accumulated human spiritual, cultural and industrial wisdom, not to mention the faultless designs of Nature herself. It’s hard to believe that, in this enlightened era of unprecedented tolerance, anyone would openly espouse deliberate and pre-meditated bias, and yet that’s precisely what Louie and Louise are doing. Among many other self-serving items on its leftist agenda, the Left Handers Club promotes the creation and dissemination of products specific to the left hand. Considering that a great majority of the population is right-handed, and that everything from can openers to golf clubs are quite sensibly fabricated to efficiently serve the greatest possible number of consumers, that amounts to a war against civilization.
The fact is, the port crowd has been treasuring up resentments against the starboard set for thousands of years. By studying the manner in which Paleolithic craftsmen chewed animal skins, paleontologists have determined that only 10 percent of them were left-handed, a proportion that has persisted throughout the ages and unsurprisingly prompted some Righties of well-intentioned, if uncritical, turn of mind to indulge in plausible, if not scientifically supported, speculations about Lefties. In ancient times, for example, the left-handed were presumed to be in league with the Devil, and it was widely believed that ghosts and demons always entered on the body’s vulnerable left side, which is why the prudent were given to tossing pinches of salt over their left shoulders at generous intervals. A ringing in the right ear signaled that somebody was praising you, while ringing in the left indicated that you were being cursed or maligned. An itchy right palm meant you were coming into money, and an itchy left palm meant you were about to lose your shirt.
The Bible holds more than a hundred passages praising the right hand (“The right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly, the right hand of the Lord is exalted! – Psalms 118:15,16) and at least two dozen lamenting the left (“He will put the sheep on his right hand and the goats on left hand…” – Matthew 25:33). Even today a holy man of Kenya’s cautious Meru culture must hide his left hand from public view lest its evil power inadvertently sour everybody’s milk.
Indeed, the left-handed have always felt oppressed by the very language in their mouths. The English word “sinister,” meaning ominous or menacing, derives from the Latin word “sinistra,” meaning both “left” and “weak.” The French word for left is “gauche,” which also means clumsy, or awkward. For that matter, the very word “left” comes to us from the Old English “lyft” which translates as idle, weak, or useless. And anything offered with the “left-hand” has long been widely understood to be inferior, insincere, or outright insulting.
By hey, that’s ancient history, okay? Before harassing the virtuous Right with a barrage of backwards scissors and east-bound stationary and maladroit keyboards, the Left should update its catalogue of presumed injustices. True, left-handed persons statistically make about 12 percent less money than their dexterous peers, but that’s the fault of anatomy, not bigotry.
By a curious quirk of the human design, each hemisphere of the brain controls the opposing half of the body. The left side of the brain, which is good at things like math and science and language, is dominant in right-handed people. Left-handed people take their marching orders from the right sides of their brains, which tend toward creativity, imagination and sociability. If right-brainers aren’t sopping up the gravy as fast as bean-counting left-brainers, it’s because they’re mathematically more likely to be starving artists than well-heeled MBAs. And for what it’s worth, left-handers tend to an excess of success in sports like tennis and fencing, which vanquished right-handers attribute to the fact that they haven’t had a lot of practice dueling with southpaws.
Nobody, including lots of very keen left-brained scientific types, has any good idea why some people are left-handed and others favor the right hand. No particular anatomical, evolutionary or environmental advantage has been recognized for either condition, and while a possible left-handed gene has been identified, the secrets of its precise function and methodology remain elusive. As it happens, astute observers are puzzled to note that dogs, and even crows, display what amounts to right/left handedness, although in roughly 50-50 proportion, which natural equilibrium may explain why neither species has yet to produce a left-pawed or right-beaked action committee.
The right brain is theater to all impulses dramatic, and it’s entirely possible that the Left Handers Club is simply a predictable manifestation of the 10 percent’s biological weakness for spectacle. If not condoned, it can certainly be tolerated by the magnanimous 90 percent, who are famously forgiving toward morally harmless physical abberation. On the other hand, cranky cuddy-wifters might be far better served directing their tantrums against the true enemy of all people subservient to a single cranial hemisphere.
Maybe, next Aug. 13, left hand will join right hand in a two-fisted condemnation of the smug and superior ambidextrous, and together dream up products to confound that one person in a hundred who enjoys equal facility with both the right hand and the left. After all, everybody hates a 1-percenter.
