During the afternoon of my 21st birthday, I was standing by the garden along one side of our house with my father, Walter McCollum. We were looking at the peony buds as they prepared to bloom into great globes of cream and magenta. The sepals were alive with black ants. “Those *%*)(#! ants!” my father observed. In 21 years, I had never, once, heard the word “*%*)” cross my father’s lips. I think I’d always assumed that he didn’t know the word “*%*).” His utterance ushered me into the company of adult men.
My dad was a cusser, but a cusser with a code. “God damn” and “hell” he felt acceptable within our family, even around me and my sister. Even those two he eliminated when other men’s wives or distant acquaintances came around. You’d have thought him ignorant of the rich palette of English profanity. I may have thought that, too, though I probably never thought about Dad’s language at all, mired in the slough of teenage solipsism as I was. I don’t recall Dad ever talking about his code, but he somehow, if only by example, made it perfectly clear to his kids. You didn’t cuss around anyone but close friends and family. No point taking a chance on offending someone, unintentionally or not.
During the ’40s and ’50s of the last century, middle class behavior was tightly bound by all sorts of standards and rules. A fellow would never go outdoors without his hat on or fail to remove it once indoors. Same went for a suit and tie, except you could keep both on indoors. If a kid wished to refer to a non-family adult, that kid had better preface the adult’s name with a “Mister” or “Mrs.” or “Miss.” These rules extended to language usage, and while they were not written, so far as I know, they were widely recognized as valid and binding.
How binding? An actor – I think it was Sterling Hayden – in a Playhouse 90 production in the early ’50s got so carried away during one dramatic scene that he injected a “damn!” into his lines. Television was live, back then, so the director had no way to bleep out the offending word, and within a week, the network had received upwards of 40,000 letters objecting to the profanation of the airways and demanding a range of recompense, mainly the blackballing of the offending actor.
No sentient being in the country existed who hadn’t encountered the word “damn” pretty much every day, yet in our public life we all had to pretend no such word existed. We of the baby boom generation found this sort of hypocrisy absurd and unconscionable, and as the ’50s melted into the ’60s, we began to make our feelings clear by ostentatious public indulgence in vulgar language. We viewed these indulgences as political statements, arguing a case that no barrier should be left standing between private and public speech or behavior.
Still, for most of the ’60s, George Carlin’s “7 Words You Can’t Say on Television” remained literally accurate. TV and radio upheld the old standards, though “damn” and “hell” seeped into the acceptable category. The recording industry, whose major market consisted now of boomer kids, was the first to allow some of those 7 words, but not until the ’70s had begun did “*%*)” make its first appearance on a major label, when Harry Nilsson sang, “You’re breaking my heart / You’re tearin’ it apart / So *%*) you.” The floodgates had opened.
By the early ’90s, they’d been obliterated. When my wife’s daughter Julia and some of her friends came out in the back yard with a boom box, I was sitting under the pergola, hidden from their view by the surrounding vines. The boom box was playing a work by their current favorites, The Insane Clown Posse. The Posse’s works seemed to consist solely of the sentiment, ” *%*) the mother-*%*)(#! mother*%*)$%@” repeated a great many times.
I was of course properly revolted, now that I’d become a responsible adult hypocrite. The group’s dependence on repetitious vulgarity and objectless rage struck me as pathetic and stunted. What struck me even more forcefully was the kids’ blithe indifference to their discovery of me sitting there as the bombardment of ” *%*)”s went on and on. Growing up after the sudden appearance of rap on the airwaves, they had not a notion that other people might be offended by such language, nor that any barrier might be desirable between their standards and those of the unknown rest of the world. Growing up, as well, after the sudden appearance of beepers and flip phones and then the internet and the smart phone, they had no notion that a distinction had once existed between private and public life. All was public, now. Transparency ruled.
While I find it appalling and offensive to hear people walking down the street talking loudly into their cell phones and the ears of any and every passerby about the most intimate aspects of their lives, I recognize that I’m simply a disgruntled survivor of a moribund social order, just like every one else who’s managed to survive for more than seventy years. Mores, including a sense of privacy, ingrained over several generations, taken as natural components of “human nature,” prove to be just mores and dissolve as quickly as spring snowfalls. We, the survivors, are left to growl and grouse. Duke Ellington wrote our theme song many years ago: Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.
They never were, of course, most especially in the Golden Age of my youth, the ’50s. While we’d gotten beyond some of the insanities of the Victorian age – we could openly refer to a piano’s legs, rather than calling them “limbs,” and we could even view women’s lower legs, though they still had to be swaddled in nylon stockings – it wasn’t only “dirty” words that were censored. Many words for the most basic elements of reality, such as birth and death, were verboten still. When Lucille Ball, who starred in one of the most popular tv series of the decade, got pregnant and kept filming her shows through the next nine months, the script was never allowed to describe her condition with the word “pregnant.” In 1956, when she judged it was time to educate her son about what were known as “the facts of life,” my best friend’s mother summed them up in these words: “The man puts his banana in the woman’s purse.” Homosexuality was still being referred to as “the sin that dare not say its name.” No one was allowed to die. We all had to Pass On.
All this bowdlerizing brought about much mischief. Boys and girls who knew no more about sex than they did about bananas found out a good deal more through unwanted pregnancies, for which the only recognized remedy was marriage, the word “abortion” still unpronounceable, and so the act beyond contemplation. Homosexuals, if discovered, were hounded from their jobs or denied employment and openly scorned and pilloried. Large numbers of people who’d shunned for many years recognition of death as a fact of life spent inordinate sums to have their permanently sleeping loved ones gussied up like high-end whores and laid out in boxes that cost more than their cars.
A dear friend in my college years, Stella Stickle, observing the growing proliferation of vulgarity and profanity, suggested that “calling a spade a spade didn’t mean you had to call it a goddam bloody shovel.” Shortly after she made that observation, I entered the Army, where nearly everyone found it impossible to produce an utterance on any subject without using “*%*)” or its derivatives at least five times per sentence. No mere spade was left unadorned with a garland of “*%*)s.” The word soon lost any force or, for that matter, meaning it had ever had, and it became impossible to use it to express outrage or contempt or anger or anything, really. Like any word repeated over and over, it became just a meaningless sound. It seems to me a similar fate has befallen our whole arsenal of profanity and vulgarity, and that seems to me a shame.
In one of his fables for our time, James Thurber wrote of “The Bear Who Let It Alone.” The bear would go in a bar and have two drinks and go home. He was quite proud of his self-control until the alcohol, as it will, dissolved it and he became a hopeless lush. “He would reel home at night, kick over the umbrella stand, knock down the bridge lamps, and ram his elbows through the windows. Then he would collapse on the floor and lie there until he went to sleep. His wife was greatly distressed and his children were very frightened.”
Ultimately the bear saw the light, reformed, and became a famous anti-alcohol crusader. To demonstrate the regenerative powers of sobriety, he would “stand on his head and on his hands and he would turn cartwheels in the house, kicking over the umbrella stand, knocking down the bridge lamps, and ramming his elbows through the windows. Then he would lie down on the floor, tired by his healthful exercise, and go to sleep. His wife was greatly distressed and his children were very frightened.” Thurber’s moral: “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.”
It does seem to me that we’ve emulated that bear in our rapid shift from Victorian squeamishness about language to our unrestrained embrace of excessive vulgarity, which has the effect of rendering vulgarity impotent to express anything at all and of leaving our ability to talk clearly and honestly about matters of life and death no better off than in Victorian times. We seem to have made no *%*)(#! progress at all.
