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Why Don’t We Curse Like Sailors?
It is a commonplace observation that the left is far more comfortable than the right when it comes to painting pictures in the vivid purple of obscenity or the lurid pink of sexual lewdness. Whether it’s the Daily Kos (every day, comments section or articles, take your pick), or The View’s (former) member Joy Behar’s frequent F-bombs, or B-list comedienne Janeane Garofalo’s rants about “tea-bagging rednecks,” or charming discussions of hate-sex with Michele Bachmann on Bill Maher’s show or — well, there are a hundred examples here – it seems that the left doesn’t simply describe things in obscene terms; they think of things that way. Vulgarity is, to borrow from Christmas Story’s Ralphy, their natural medium.
My question is: what are we missing out on? And why?
The difference between liberals and conservatives as regards profanity seems to be taken for granted. I have never heard anyone ask where this difference comes from. Is it that something in liberal ideology is more philosophically accepting of obscenity? Or is the psychology of average liberals somehow different from that of conservatives? Or is it a question of class? Are wealthier, more educated people less inclined to use gutter language?
The left doesn’t have a monopoly on profanity, but they easily have a controlling share. I think it extends beyond the public realm too. If I meet someone and within a half-hour of accumulated conversation they use everyone’s favorite blue word in casual conversation, I conclude that they must be a liberal. (I am being a snob here, because I am excluding from consideration a whole class of people who use four letter words as a staple of expression).
Let me begin my sketch of an answer with a quotation from G.K. Chesterton:
It is the very definition of profanity that it thinks and speaks of certain things prosaically, which other men think and speak of poetically. It is thus a defeat of the imagination, and a volume full of the wildest pictures and most impious jests remains in its essential character a piece of poor literalism, a humdrum affair.
Or, as my father used to say, people who use obscenity do so because they lack the vocabulary to express things more properly. This very conservative critique of profanity has extraordinarily deep roots in our society – roots that go beyond our current liberal-conservative dichotomy. According to this understanding, The New York Times and The New Republic are very conservative publications. They do not permit obscene language in their pages or their online comments. You have to descend one or two steps from the polite society of these types of journals until the language schism between conservative and liberal is evident. By the time we are in the realm of The Daily Kos and (no insult intended) RedState, the language schism has turned into a canyon.
Perhaps the simplest explanation of the difference is that the left views itself as a rebellion against established, bourgeois values – in essence, it retains the adolescent rejection of parental norms – and one of those values is a prohibition of sexually explicit or barnyard locutions. While the leftist may grow beyond his adolescent years, he remains true to the revolutionary spirit of youth. The left always lionizes the peevish, ignorant young – look at the Cultural Revolution – in large part because of their incapacity to deal with their own mortality…but that is a different book in the making.
On the other hand, we in the conservative world of Ricochet are very careful to censor the raunchiness of our contributors…with occasional exception*. Our rationale is fairly simple: we don’t want to produce a document that we would be embarrassed to have our teenage daughters read. As someone who has three teenage daughters, this is something of a yuk. First of all, they are reading and watching stuff that would make truck drivers blush. Second, Ricochet’s appeal for teenage girls is – I am sorry to tell you all – slightly deficient. (I am not saying that the fault of that lies entirely with Ricochet).
Before proceeding, I want to be clear that I am all for the Ricochet speech code. We are a class act and we should look and sound that way…and I don’t expect that a lot of teenage girls will be coming by one way or another.
But I began this fugue by asking what of this world of liberal smut we are missing out on. Because Chesterton also says that every vulgar notion and joke invariably contains a “subtle and spiritual ideal.” The conservative voices who are willing to stray into the raunchy and profane in service of a justified ridicule of the Obamas, Hillary, Warren, Pelosi and all the rest are subtle and spiritual indeed. And we need them. I am talking here about writers (all too few of them) like P.J. O’Rourke and, more recently, Greg Gutfeld.
There is a big difference between liberals’ lazy, non-stop, filthy language (as my sister says: “you eat with that mouth?”) on the one hand, and the well-timed, guided missile strike of a devastating curse on the other. That favorite blue word I alluded to earlier can be brilliant and hilarious and spiritual when used properly. There is an adolescent, after all, inside of all of us.
Maybe it is time to start a Ricochet-Blue. If someone does, please contact me, because I’ve already written in my mind (while writing this article) pieces on Liz Warren and Valerie Jarrett that I think would fit in nicely. And besides, it would be nice writing for a blog that teenage girls might take a second look at.
* I believe the technical Ricochet style manual says: “except in the case of recent Jeopardy winners”…or something like that.
Published in General
Look – we can talk about doing the right thing, using our vocabulary and our brains, talk about how the Left uses these words more than we might and so, to our thinking, there’s something inherently wrong with it, but –
But.
We are human. I swear in sailor-like fashion all the time – but at home, or with longtime friends or family. It is as normal a part of conversation as subject and predicate.
I don’t swear in front of strangers. Why? Because I don’t know them.
I don’t swear at work, unless it’s a co-worker I’ve gotten to know and he or she is cool, to put it simply.
That’s about it. Shackling your emotions to propriety is a pretty good way of dehumanizing yourself. Anger, joy, and all shades in between require expression to be human.
One last thing: Sanctimonious is not an adjective we need applied to conservatism.
Great, now I have Motörhead stuck in my head …
Plug in my father—a gentleman both literally and figuratively—and it sounds like you get a 1:1 correspondence with your grandfather. I remember each and every time he showed anger to me, because that’s not hard to do when you can count them on the fingers of one hand with fingers left over. And I distinctly recall the one time I ever heard him exclaim “bull****!”
From where I sit, I’ve totally allowed my mouth to run away with me—so much so that I’m making a conscious effort to rehabilitate it. However, I’m apparently still ahead of the cultural trend; a few years back, colleagues at my startup employer teased me about my overweening propriety. I looked at them, paused for effect, then offered a blue streak that elicited audible gasps and, I would venture to guess, induced a few nightmares that evening, the word picture having been inspired by Hieronymous Bosch, H.R. Giger, Stephen King, and Clive Barker.
Sometimes you have to remind people that you keep your weapons sheathed for their sake.
As you should!
Why don’t we curse like the Liberals? Because we are better than they are. And I think you have it right. They want to suggest subversiveness, even when their position is the establishment position.
The more offended I get, especially in a political discussion, the more formal my language becomes. I also begin to increase the amount of $20 words, as my Granny called them. Part of it is because I share Bob Heinlein’s love of polysyllabic words, but a good part of it comes from the consternation that flows from an opponent when you refuse to indulge in gutter language.
The familiarity of an innuendo or direct and earthy language is best shared within a well defined sphere of intimate acquaintance. – friends, family and lovers.
I just want to make clear that I curse like a soldier.
Not a sailor.
So … your cursing gets the job done but with less elegance?
;-)
Probably. I remember one time during Basic, after the third F-bomb in as many minutes, I exclaimed “Can we actually get along without all this —–ing cursing!?”
Apparently not. I couldn’t even complain about cursing without cursing.