On Profanity and Politics

Michigan’s newly sworn-in Rep. Rashida Tlaib got a lot of attention over the weekend after she was inadvertently taped telling a group of liberal activists that she hoped to impeach President Donald Trump, It wasn’t her use of the so-called “I Word” that drew notice, however, but rather that she called Trump a very vulgar term that implies he has Oedipal tendencies.

Trump responded that Tlaib had “disgraced herself” with such language, and of course there was also much tsk-tsking about it on the right, but they’re all hypocrites for doing so. Trump himself has used the alluded-to term in front of a large crowd knowing that the microphones were on and the cameras were rolling and it would live forever on YouTube, and he has done as much as anyone to drag America’s political discourse into the rhetorical gutter. Such Trumpian language as “schlonged” and “son of a bitch” and the use of “pussy” in a certain sense were once dutifully bowdlerized by such respectable publications as this, but these days all those asterisks seem unnecessary for even such a respectable readership as ours..

Which is a gosh-darned shame, as far as we’re concerned.

The coarsening of the American language has long been a project of the left, starting with the vastly overrated nightclub comedian Lenny Bruce and all those foul-mouthed hippy-dippy protestors and Hollywood movies of the ’60s and ’70s. President Bill Clinton’s administration also prematurely introduced the kiddos to all sorts of adult subjects on the evening news, and it’s still mostly Democrats cussing in from the children. Leftist publications and podcasts are also more prone to profanity than those on the right, too, and their audiences are clearly comfortable with except when Trump says it, as they’re also all a bunch of hypocrites.

There’s always been plenty of cussing on the right, to be sure, but for the most part it’s been saved for discreet occasions. President Richard Nixon infamously had to have numerous expletives deleted from the transcripts of the White House tapes, but at the time he thought he was only talking to his co-conspirators and didn’t guess that posterity was also listening in. Subsequent Republican presidents have surely used salty language as well, but they saved it for the appropriate occasions and took care not to do so in mixed company or with any microphones around. The erstwhile “party of family values” seemed to appreciate the effort, and fought a revanchist culture war for a more polite bygone era of popular culture and political discourse.

By the time Trump started running for president, however, much of the Republican party was in no effin’ mood for such niceties. They were convinced that they’d only to that $#@^%* President Barack Obama because their candidates had been too genteel in their attacks, and focused to much on policy disagreements rather than Obama’s African heritage and other perceived personal shortcomings, and they could clearly see Trump wasn’t going to repeat that mistake. Trump’s die-hard defenders found his frequent vulgarity “authentic,” the same meaningless word the left had always used to defend its foul-mouthed heroes, and some even misconstrued it as honesty.

Since taking office has at least been presidential enough to lay off the “f-bombs,” but he sat silently the rap star and obvious nutcase Kanye West filled the Oval Office with them, and he’s often used slightly less salty language himself, and his administration has also prematurely introduced a new generation of kiddos to some very adult subjects on the evening news.

Go ahead and call us old-fashioned, but it really does seem a dad-blamed shame. On occasion we’ll resort to profanity, but only on special occasion. There are a few jokes we like to tell which require them, but we save those for our more disreputable sort of friends, and we try not to make a habit of it lest we blurt something out in a job interview or when meeting an attractive woman’s parents or children. Besides, we’re old enough remember a time when the popular culture and political discourse were more polite, and we recall it was one of the things that made America great back then.

— Bud Norman

Our Foul-Mouthed and Politically Correct Politics

By now you’ve probably seen the video of two cute young Latino children cussing Donald Trump with all the vulgarity of a late-night cable television comedian. It’s “gone viral,” as they say in the internet biz, and has no doubt generated a lot of t-shirt sales for the “Deport Racism 2016” group that came up with the idea. We don’t expect it will adversely affect Trump’s popularity, however, as the average viewer will probably be more inclined to support him so that he might deport the foul-mouthed urchins at the first opportunity. What we find most interesting about the video is the left’s continuing fondness for obscenity.

Drop in on any left-leaning web site or “alternative” newspaper and you’ll notice a proliferation of profanity, of course the movies and television shows that the vast west wing of Hollywood produces are full of foul language, a similar vulgarity seems to pervade the conversations of most of our liberal friends, even the Vice President of the United States felt compelled drop an “F-bomb” to commemorate the passage of Obamacare, and this isn’t the first time that children have been dragged into it. The left regards cussing as authentically proletarian, even though the authentic proletariate is still saying grace before a meal and washing its kids’ mouths out with soap for such outbursts, and it fancies itself bravely defying the stultifying conventions of bourgeois society, even though it’s been a long time since the martyrdom of Lenny Bruce and by now what’s left of bourgeois society is no longer capable of stultifying even the most obnoxious behaviors.

Our newly-won freedom to spew curse words might be considered a small and insignificant expansion of liberty, but it’s hardly ample compensation for all the restrictions that the left wants to impose. Everything from %&*# to *+$@ is now allowed in the public square, but all sorts of formerly useful and respectable terms are now forbidden in polite company. “He” is an offensive word if used in reference to men who consider themselves women, “merit” and “hard work” are considered racist code in the more refined quarters of academia, of course “illegal immigrant” is not allowed to describe an immigrant who has entered the country illegally, and in the Democratic presidential race presumptive candidate Hillary Clinton is accusing pesky challenger and self-described socialist — which was formerly a dirty word — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders of being racist for using the word “urban” in their ongoing gun control debate. Try injecting any honest acknowledgment of the higher rate of criminal activity in certain communities into that debate or the related arguments over the “Black Lives Matter” movement and the police, and you’ll find that the certain points of view are now out of bounds no matter how profanely phrased. Anything having to do with sex, of course, is similarly constrained by the new rules of polite discourse.

Sooner or later, we fervently hope, the public will grow weary of it. Those foul-mouthed kids are getting a lot more “dislikes” than “likes” on their “viral video” on YouTube, although the number of “dislikes” seems to grow suspiciously smaller each time we check, and still the comments are mostly negative and many of them are coming from self-described Latinos who are insisting that it is more representative of liberals than Latinos. We’re no fans of the buffoonish and insulting Trump, and would have preferred that someone had championed the border-enforcement cause with equally forceful but more carefully phrased arguments, as regular readers of this publication know, but we had to sympathize with the many commentators who said the video seemed to prove his arguments for even the most bluntly explained crackdown on illegal immigration. The arrogance and ignorance of the child stars will not persuade anyone that America should abandon its borders, the objective fact that some parts of town are more dangerous than others will not go unnoticed, and all the rest of that nonsense about gender-neutral pronouns and the hidden racism in everyday idioms will eventually become too much of a hassle for busy moms and dads. It’s a bunch of %&*# and *+$@, as far as we’re concerned, but at least we’re free to put it that way.

— Bud Norman

On Presidential Profanity

President Barack Obama reportedly spewed a “profanity-laced tirade” against the press recently, and we would have loved to have heard it. Partly because we always enjoy hearing the news media getting a good cussing, and partly because it would have been interesting to hear what complaints he might have against such a compliant lot of scribes, but mostly because we’d like know how adept he is with salty language.

One might easily surmise that the president is nostalgic for the more hagiographic sort of coverage he got back in the halcyon days of ’08, when his every utterance was treated as prophetic and the photographers always took care to add that eerie halo effect, so it’s not surprising that he would resent the relatively frank accounts of how things are going that he now occasionally endures. One still wonders what specific gripes he might have offered among the obscenities, however, and whether any recent Republican presidents would sympathize.

Of far greater interest would be the president’s proficiency with profanity. Although liberals are fond of foul language, an affinity they have indulged gratuitously at least since the days of Lenny Bruce’s martyrdom, we have noticed they are rarely any good at it. Most liberals simply pepper their speech with the gerund form of a familiar term for sexual intercourse, a habit which by now is far more monotonous than transgressive, with an occasional accusation of Oedipal tendencies leveled against conservatives. They infrequently employ the harsher terms deriving from female genitalia, perhaps for fear of offending the feminists they hope to bed, and they rarely invoke a common expression for those engage in fellatio, lest they be considered homophobic, which would also diminish their chances with the feminists they hope to bed, and their vocabulary of vulgarisms is conspicuously limited. Almost never do they achieve the staccato rhythms and poetic alliteration that make swearing truly swing. This is most likely because so few of them have served in the military or worked at blue collar trades, the professions that have elevated obscenity to an art form, but it might also be the same lack of imagination that characterizes the rest of liberal rhetoric.

Having watched the embarrassing spectacle of Obama attempting to throw a ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game, and having seen the sissy helmet he wears when pedaling his sissy bike around Martha’s Vineyard, we suspect he is especially ill-suited to such a masculine pursuit as profanity. The hesitant and halting speeches he sputters when speaking impromptu further indicate he has no talent for the free-flowing torrents of verbal vile necessary to make cussing successful. Even if the writers of that famously foul-mouthed “Deadwood” series that ran on HBO were to provide the script for his teleprompter, we doubt that his usual haughty chin-up delivery would be equal to the task.

Which is not to say that a president can’t cuss, of course. Lyndon Johnson was famously vulgar when coercing congressmen into supporting his disastrous agenda, which we are thankful is another talent that Obama has not yet demonstrated, and the transcripts of Richard Nixon’s tape-recorded White House conversations once made “expletive deleted” a household phrase. Johnson was from Texas, though, and Nixon was a Navy man, so both had some education in the art. That fancy Hawaiian prep school and Columbia University and Harvard’s law school probably did not provide Obama a similar tutelage. Should the president’s poll numbers continue their recent slide, however, he might get the knack of it yet.

— Bud Norman