Rick's July Tirade
A Meditation on Profanity
On a fair June afternoon somewhere in that vast vegetable patch
known as the American Midwest, a young man lost his balance and
toppled out of a canoe. As he hit the cold water in his street
clothes, he promptly spewed a mouthful of pungent oaths into the
fragrant spring breeze.
I can't tell you how pungent his oaths were, or how many he
spewed, because I wasn't there and the newspaper accounts wouldn't
go into specifics. I CAN tell you that he had the misfortune to be
overheard by some ladies and children who were paddling in the
vicinity. Because of his momentary lapse in verbal decorum, our
waterlogged friend was dragged to court and - are you ready for
this? - sentenced to THREE MONTHS in a place where canoeing ranks
low on the list of available amusements.
Meanwhile, a Canadian-born clergyman living in upstate New York
learned that he would be denied U.S. citizenship because he had been
arrested once, in the high recklessness of his youth, for possession
of marijuana. He pleaded with the bureaucrats to reconsider his
case, but he might as well have tried to move the Taj Mahal to
Minneapolis. Exasperated and distraught, he finally wrote a letter
denouncing his stiff-necked adversaries as "evil
bastards."
What happened next? The "evil bastards" made sure the
letter was read by members of the clergyman's congregation. Shocked
by their pastor's uncouth turn of phrase, the pious parishioners
decided to send him packing. Now, suddenly jobless in an alien land,
he faces deportation to the Great White North.
I cite these tales of woe not because I endorse the proliferation
of profanity throughout an already profaned republic, but because
both stories, occurring in such rapid succession, floored me with a
one-two punch to that most prominent and fragile organ in my mental
anatomy: my sense of justice. How could two ordinary people be made
to suffer so grievously for perfectly reasonable responses to nasty
predicaments?
When $20 million-a-film stars pummel us with profanity from the
big screen, we comfort them with accolades and riches. They enjoy
the company of gaudy lovers and obsequious chauffeurs; they dwell
like sultans in many-roomed palaces and subtropical gardens. We
giggle at the schoolboy wickedness of radio shock-jocks and never
tire of their trash talk; we pay for books and magazines that revel
in showing us the "f-word," again and again, in case we've
forgotten how to spell it.
Perched at the apex of the profanity pyramid are the hot standup
comics who haunt trendy nightclubs and pay-cable stations. The funny
thing is that there's nothing funny about profanity. Our
professional jesters typically use vile language as a kind of verbal
Viagra: to boost the potency of flaccid material, to overpower
rather than tickle the audience. Still, we snicker and applaud; the
comic goes home a conqueror.
My point is that our professional promulgators of profanity - the
actors, screenwriters, playwrights, successful comics, rock stars,
rap artists, pop novelists and radio jockeys - have little to swear
about. They might have to put up with lackluster room service now
and then, or perhaps a peeping paparazzo behind the bushes, but on
the whole they lead elegant and pampered lives. They spew their
oaths gratuitously, without the justification of plunging from a
canoe or being stymied by oafish bureaucrats. And we reward them
with still more piles of shekels for the maintenance of their
Bugatti collections and subterranean love grottos.
But when two low-status males let fly a few spontaneous,
genuinely appropriate words of wrath, their lives are ruined beyond
redemption. I detect the unmistakable stink of injustice here, don't
you?
Profanity is a linguistic safety valve: it keeps us from silently
exploding with unverbalized, artery-popping rage. When our grocery
bag tears open and lets a 48-ounce glass bottle of grape juice crash
to the floor... when we're caught in a zero-mph traffic jam on the
way to our grandmother's funeral... when a vertical stack of 28 VHS
videotapes sways and collapses, moments after we successfully
extricated the third one from the bottom... when America Online bids
us "Goodbye" just as we're putting the finishing touches
on a masterly message-board post that took us nearly an hour to
create... then profanity comes to our aid like General Pershing's
army arriving in France, like salvation to a sinner, like an antacid
after an Italian dinner.
As a child of the Donna Reed suburbs, I grew up with an intense
aversion to the mildest of bad language. I believed that anything
with a title like "Damn Yankees" was strictly for
unwholesome wretches who courted perdition through overindulgence in
whiskey, poker, cigarettes and other mysterious urban vices. I was
genuinely shocked when, in the midst of reciting a church creed, I
was forced to intone the words, "He descended into HELL."
What kind of sleazy outfit was this, anyway?
College liberated my attitude for a few years, as I began to
relish the lusty pleasures of a loosened tongue. My inner
Neanderthal was coming to life. But once I earned my diploma, I
rolled up my tongue again and put a decorous face on my words.
It was only about four years ago, when I first found myself at
the mercy of a fiendish contrivance known as Windows, that I began
to seek regular solace in the hairy-chested vocabulary I had long
ago abandoned. Microsoft gave me no alternative. When a normal
screen suddenly and unaccountably transforms itself into a
three-column format with decorative frames across the top and won't
transform itself back, no matter how many ridiculous little icons we
click, a simple "Dang!" won't cut the mustard. We require
the verbal horsepower that only the baddest of bad four-letter
expletives can deliver.
In fact, I soon exhausted the meager supply of epithets available
to the modern speaker of English. Like an addict, I had to keep
upping the dose to achieve maximum relief; I'd combine the basic
four-letter words with more outlandish phrases of my own invention.
My neighbors at work must have chuckled or trembled as they
overheard me muttering dark imprecations at my evil screen,
condemning to everlasting torment the thrice-damned sons of
Beelzebub who insisted on capitalizing the first word of every line
in my catalog copy.
Compared against the robust maledictions of the Elizabethans, who
delighted in calling each other everything from "bull's pizzle"
to "whoreson gorbellied knave," profanity in America -
like so much else in our prematurely dilapidated culture - is a
doltish and sorry spectacle. Most of it, curiously enough, centers
around four institutions that we as a culture simultaneously revere
and despise: sex, the human body, parents and religion.
The celebrated f-word and its variants have been made to work
overtime as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection, and, in
some quarters, the middle name of God's only begotten son. (Yet, for
some unknown reason, when they shorten it to an initial they always
use the letter H.) What any of it has to do with copulation, or even
common sense, is beyond me. Most of us look forward to the delights
of the bedchamber, yet what do we say when we want to curse an
adversary? We command him to enjoy those pleasures forthwith! Yes,
as a punishment for your transgressions, may you experience the most
delirious sensations known to the human body! (Thanks! Same to you,
buddy.)
This clueless reasoning applies to our other expletives as well.
When forced to confront the hard reality of a forgotten appointment
or missed deadline, we typically invoke the end-product of our large
intestines. When the office copier swallows three pages and traps
them somewhere in its innards, we reckon that our wayward machine
was the offspring of a she-dog. After dropping a critically
important wing-nut into the hidden recesses of our car's engine, we
ask the creator of the universe to banish that wing-nut to the
infernal regions, where it would entertain no hope of future
salvation. No harp or feathered wings for that accursed nut; no
romping amid the smiling cherubim and seraphim. Down it plunges into
the murky and incinerating depths from which no wing-nut ever
emerges - sort of like the recesses of the engine where we lost it
in the first place.
Though I vent heartily in private, I still hesitate to bandy
expletives before a live audience - whether in print or in person.
Most of my wrath is directed at inanimate objects, anyway... objects
that appear to delight in mocking my ineptitude: the aforementioned
computer programs, copiers, wing-nuts and other instruments of
Satan. I usually make an effort not to foul the air around a human
face, except on rare occasions when it truly deserves to be fouled.
The way I see it, the overuse of profanity - especially our
loutish, mind-numbing, contemporary Anglo-American brand of
profanity - is a kind of full-frontal assault on the sensibilities
of those who hear it. It kills innocence and strips the language of
its native grace. It imposes our will on others, which at least
partly explains its widespread popularity. People who pepper their
speech with gratuitous profanity, whether in person or on a big
screen, are figuratively shoving their private parts in our faces.
There's a time to let it out and a time to zip it up.
The two unfortunates who were caught with their verbal pants
down, in the Midwest and upstate New York, had every right to let it
out. Unlike much of what we hear on the streets or in the theaters,
their language was admirably appropriate to their predicaments.
Their vindictive punishments tell me that our society has split into
two extreme camps on the issue of profanity, as it has with
abortion, gun control, and a diet low in saturated fats.
Why does it have to be all or none? Why do we have to choose
between bacon cheeseburgers and alfalfa sprouts? It's time we
recognized that a little indulgence in salty language can be
beneficial to our health. And that too much of it can make us sick.
The next time my computer wantonly decides to insert bullets down
the left margin, I should be free to retaliate with a blast from the
full orchestra of my vocabulary. And I shouldn't have to risk
incarceration or deportation if someone happens to be strolling past
my cubicle.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
