“my barbaric yelp…”
I am deliberately misquoting Walt Whitman because: 1) It seems like a catchy way to introduce a post about Yelping; and 2) Mr. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is still alive and essential.
I think I do some of my best writing on platforms like Yelp. I don’t do it all that often, and I’m not that practiced at it. But when I do, it’s an exercise in freedom — I get to let my feelings way, way out, and I don’t have to be fair. When I am reviewing something on Yelp, I get to do everything I don’t tolerate in normal discourse. Climb onto soapbox? Check. Make sweeping statements? Check. Use sarcastic plays on words? Check. Include qualifiers and hedges? Hell, no! I am there to give my vaunted opinion, and I consider it a public service. Here’s a recent example, posted a couple of weeks ago:
Worst store in so many ways — nationally and locally. And we all know it. We all know that their stores are full of cheap junk sourced by predatory practices that dictate what their vendors can ask. And we all know that they have been caught dismally exploiting their own employees — did you know that a hefty percentage of [this Big Box Store’s] workers are receiving food stamps? AND local folks know that this location is dim, dirty, disorganized, and careless. We never shop there if we can help it.
Deathless prose? Well, no. That paragraph may not actually have any lasting rhetorical merit, and that’s fine. But it was deeply satisfying to write. I then detailed the exact transaction we had gotten suckered into (even though we should have known better). I reported the highly unsatisfactory outcome, which was that the store was going to make us wait another four days before we could pick up the item we had ordered — even though they had two of them in stock at that very moment! So I recounted all that nonsense, in a colorful fury, and finished with this:
Oh, you’ll get your toy — when [Big Box Store] is good and ready to give it to you.
Really, the place is a blight on American commerce.
Never again.
Re-reading these lines now, I imagine them to be portentous, concise, almost haiku-like. Damn, I’m good, I think. So, despite how painstaking I am with my other essays, I still get a huge bang out of tossing out little opinion grenades like this. I sit back and say, with smug pleasure, “There! That’ll show ‘em!”
I’m well aware of the absurdity of that pleasure. I know all too keenly that such postings are tiny, ephemeral, mist droplets in a typhoon-times-infinity. Those utterances don’t really show anybody anything, except that perhaps I am worrying about the wrong things.
So what’s the point?
I used to hate that they named it “Yelp” — it sounds undignified; it’s not an attractive word. And many of the posts are undignified and unattractive as well. But I get why people write them. Often, they are honest, immediate outcries from people who just got railroaded, stonewalled, or cheated; people who just got their tails stepped on, hard. And even though some people insist that we “vote with our pocketbook,” and we know we can all choose to shop elsewhere, or whatever, we know that those decisions only have any effect at scale — individually, we don’t have a particle of influence. So when you’ve just had all you can take, and some institution carelessly tries to grind you up in its policies and practices and profitable ineptitude, you may find that you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore. You Yelp.
So I will keep Yelping. When praise is merited, I will pour it on. But when something seems unfair or shabby, I’m just going to go ahead and shout it out. I won’t make personal attacks, and I won’t lie. But in a culture where true accountability is vanishing, sinking into the ocean of chaos like the Titanic, I will register what I see and hear as the ship goes down. I will not go quietly.
Walt Whitman captured this urge a century and a half ago:
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
A YAWP; a Yelp — they are akin. Now, you may wish to tell me about detachment and relaxation and letting things go, and I will listen politely. And then I will say: “You do you, my friend.”
For I have a different need; I need to bite life, participate in it, engage with it here and now. If there is injustice, large or small, I need to Yelp, and protest, and sound my poetic and visceral YAWP. If nothing else, it may keep my head from exploding for another day or two, which would definitely void my warranty.
Update: We received the item the very next day after my Yelp review was posted. Coincidence? I think not.
