Illustration by Bob AulI was sitting and writing at my home-office computer the other day when a kid, maybe 6 at the oldest, ran past the house, and, in that exuberant way children have, shouted, “Fuck you!” to a youthful compatriot and anyone else within the ZIP code.
I took some consolation in the fact that he hadn't been shouting it at me. I have a hard time dealing with criticism from persons my junior. But long after his little footfalls had vanished down the street, the sound of that Sopranoism in his giddyap-horsey voice haunted me.
What is this world coming to? Back when I was young, I don't even think I heard the word “fuck” until I was 8, and I didn't feel comfortable using it socially until I was 12. When you're 6, you should have other tools of expression—I recommend Play-Doh —and you grow into the more advanced media such as Spaghetti-Os, watercolors and smut.
When I was a kid, “fuck” wasn't a word to fuck around with. Parents didn't say it. No one in movies said it. Henry Miller books were banned for saying it. Lenny Bruce said it and got jailed for it. It was so proscribed that you'd think “fuck” was the secret launch code for our nuclear arsenal. It wasn't because that LBJ had a mouth on him and otherwise would have started World War III every time his grits were served runny. But we only know of LBJ's private speech due to more recently published exposs, just as we've now read that JFK never felt he'd really had a woman until he'd had her “all three ways.” You didn't read about that kind of stuff in the '60s.
I got paddled just for calling a fourth-grade school chum a “goddamned son of a bitch.”
“No one talks like that while I'm around!” exclaimed the teacher who grabbed me by the scruff of the neck.
“I didn't know you were around,” I said, truthfully, while wondering that I'd never noticed my neck had a scruff before.
Principals back then would whack you with a cricket-bat-shaped maple paddle with half-dollar-sized holes drilled through it to make it hurt more, so don't let anyone blame “the permissive '60s” for 6-year-olds shouting “fuck” in the streets today.
So whom do we blame for the coarsening of our culture? Let's blame Richard Nixon, just because I haven't blamed him for anything recently. It's poetry time:
“Don't change Dicks in the middle of a screw, Vote for Nixon in '72,” So said protesters protesting the war, That's what they were protesting for, Saying, “Fuck the war, and Agnew, too,” And other such things as protesters do. But you want to know who swore more? Nixon swore like a stevedore, “Those fucking blacks and spics and Jews,” So said Nixon in '72.
I have a soft spot for Nixon these days. When he wasn't busy rotting democracy at its core, he did some relatively progressive things. And unlike most presidents who followed him, he at least had the good sense to look guilty. But those potty-mouthed Watergate tapes were an unfortunate revelation.
With the arrogance of youth, I pretty much thought that my generation had invented fucking and its attendant slang. Then suddenly the newspapers were bursting with transcripts of the president of the United States and his cronies engaging in mobster chatter: swearing a blue streak, entertaining all manner of racial invective and wistful talk of whacking people, and not with a maple paddle.
By then, such language had begun to trickle into films and print. The floodgates only opened after the nation realized that the dirty words we hoarded away were common coin for the boys in the Oval Office, where Lincoln once sat.
(Historical true digression: Lincoln once visited the field headquarters of George McClellan to urge the indecisive, balky general into battle with the Rebs. Finding soldiers in camp building a privy for the general, Lincoln asked, “Is it a one-holer or a two-holer?” A confused Bluecoat responded that it was a single-hole privy, sir.
“Thank God,” Lincoln responded, “for if it were a two-holer, before McClellan could make up his mind which to use, he would beshit himself.”)1
A very few papers published Nixon's actual words, and some of the more sordid stuff wasn't released for years. But even in the “[expletive deleted]” versions, it was contextually obvious what words were being used. It's always obvious. Humans hone in on swear words like they were Easter eggs. I could have used *%#@ throughout this article and you'd still read it as fuck. It's like it's the secret name of God or something, to which we may allude but never utter.
What a strange double-standard. In the April 25 Los Angeles Times Laugh Lines, there was a joke from Jay Leno in which the punch line asked you to think about a guy getting butt-fucked by an ostrich. This being the Times, they didn't say “butt-fucked by an ostrich,” but that was the joke's obvious, inescapable import, right there in the funny pages alongside Peanutsand Cathy. No one gives the Times flak for that, but folks invariably get upset with the Weekly when it saves folks the 1/32 of a second it takes the brain to translate a double-entendre.
Fuck fuck fuck. Fuckety fuck fuck.2 There, if repetition robs a word of impact, I have just made the world safer from obscenity. But, in truth, it already has no impact. We've killed it. What does it mean? Nothing! In the phrase “Fuck that!” the word “that” has more meaning because, in the context in which it is said, you'd likely know what “that” is while no one knows what the fuck “fuck” is. Suppose “that” was the concept of a Marxist state. How would you even begin fucking that, in the carnal understanding of the word? As Bruce pointed out, if “Fuck you!” had a literal definition, it would be among the nicest things you could wish upon someone, unless it involved an ostrich. It's a verb; it's a noun; it's an airplane!
My surf-guitarist friend Steve Soest and I were talking over tacos the other day about the diminished state of fuck. “There are no words of power anymore,” Steve bemoaned. Our tacos were fuckin' good, but there's no way of conveying that now. We were sad, the way we get sad when we think about all the cool guitars at Kay Kalie Music circa 1966.3
If you wanted to learn about sex when I was a kid, it was a process sort of like the blind Brahmin and the elephant: you had to assemble your information from such disparate sources as a medical dictionary here, an airbrushed Playmate there, a tampon manual, school-yard gossip—one classmate had no notion of the mechanics of sex but was positive it lasted seven minutes. Today, though, everyone is only a couple of mouse clicks away from streaming video of firehose-dicked horses screwing Latvian chicks, gophers and whatever.4
That's what happens when you take a bite from the Tree of Knowledge: the next thing you know, it's gone bio-tech. Even Dracula movies used to be bloodless; today, kids romp through gore-packed video games. Turn on a TV and you get chair-wielding transsexuals. Go to a museum and you get Piss Christ.
Parents can't shield kids from information anymore. They're too busy explaining why the president stains dresses, why the policeman sometimes shoots and frames innocent people, and why Daddy's company is killing the planet. When every sound bite, commercial and would-be artist is out to shock us, maybe the most important lesson we can teach jaded kids is that some things still warrant our shock. With so many atrocious things, you'll have to choose carefully. Given global warming, corporate globalization, species die-offs, famine and a few million other concerns, poor “fuck” may have to go on the back burner for a while.
1. I sometimes wonder how history might be different if Lincoln had made comedies in Hollywood and W.C. Fields had been president during the Civil War. Both make me proud to be an American.
2. Did Dennis Miller already say this? If so, I'm sorry.
3. Soest's Torquays play at the Fullerton Market on May 4 at 6 p.m. It's free! Our tacos were had at the Sanchez Burrito Company on Chapman in Orange. Jim Washburn's hair by Leslie's Head Quarters, Newport Beach.
4. Not that I'm recommending www.thehun.com.
