Wit & Attitude Quote by David Antin

Antin’s line isn’t interested in “myth” as charming folklore; it wants to expose “myth” as a power move disguised as a neutral category. The sentence is built like a joke with a knife in it: who gets to name a story “myth,” and what kinds of bodies are presumed to be telling it?

The grotesque descriptors do the real work. “Smelly,” “little,” “brown” aren’t random insults so much as an inventory of how colonial modernity reduces the non-Western speaker to sensory disgust and physical smallness. Antin stages the racist gaze as the quote’s engine, forcing the reader to hear the slur-like cadence and then notice the institutional costume on the other side: “a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.” The white suit suggests the ethnographer’s fieldwork chic, the missionary’s hygienic morality, the colonial administrator’s authority. The binoculars are perfect: distance turned into method, surveillance mistaken for understanding. This isn’t listening; it’s looking from far away and calling that objectivity.

Antin, associated with talk-poems and conceptual performance, often treated language as a live site of social sorting. Here he’s showing how “myth” can function as an epistemic downgrade: a story told by “them” that “we” file under error, superstition, or quaint culture, while our own organizing stories get promoted to “history,” “science,” or “theory.” The intent is to make the taxonomy itself feel dirty. The subtext is accusatory: the “terrible lie” may not be the so-called myth at all, but the pretense that the observer’s whiteness, tools, and vocabulary don’t already rig the encounter.