They're not retarded, they just act it

David Greising has an on-line column in the Chicago Tribune about the new movie Tropic Thunder, decrying the problem with the use of the term 'retard' in the film:

The movie spreads insult and caricature like napalm across our social sensibilities. It puts an actor in blackface and portrays a Jewish producer as an amoral money grubber, but it's the repeated use of the word "retard"—the "R-word," as some call it—that is the subject of great debate... As I watched the movie, with my cognitively impaired son on one side and a biracial family friend on the other, a different thought arose in my mind. I wondered why the flatulence advocates have kept so quiet... This particular satire was directed at the sort of people who are overly sensitive, who are almost willfully dense, when it comes to assessing comedy... It is easier for people to lash out at satire than to try to understand it. We are comfortable with parody, which winks and nods and tries to remain friends with the subjects of its humor. But we have grown intolerant of satire... Parody is to satire as Jay Leno is to Chris Rock. Satire is ruthless. It attacks without apology. It lays waste without excuse. The bigger the target, the more arch the attack, the more ruthless the humor, the better the joke. Ben Stiller and his co-writers are far from Swift and hardly Voltaire. Some of Tropic Thunder's targets are all-too obvious— self-absorbed actors, for example. Its use of blackface does not quite deliver on a satiric intent... Now the word "retarded" is in the sights of the semantics pedantics. Some are equating it with "nigger," a word that cannot be funny under any circumstances. But to put "retarded" into a class with the "N-word" is to cheapen the treachery of that slur... "Retarded," on the other hand, is a word that well-meaning people used until recently. It was commonplace largely because gentler and more precise descriptions had not yet come into use. Nothing ill was meant by using it, and offense was not yet taken. That is changing, but gradually, as people become more educated about the challenges—and the capabilities—of people with disabilities...