On Vulgarity

Donald Trump called Ted Cruz a pussy. Or, to cite his weasel words on the topic, Donald Trump “retweeted” this vulgarism with reference to Cruz after a woman in his New Hampshire audience shouted it out to him.

This is classic Trump. Obnoxiously aggressive one day, and ready the next day with protestations of his innocence. The man, of course, is frighteningly creepy, but he’s nothing compared to his followers. 

Who are these millions who want to support this guy?

The short answer is that they are frustrated and frightened, and they are incapable of thinking their way out of their fearful predicament.

In critical thinking, underdeveloped they are (as Yoda might say).

The word pussy itself deserves some attention. If we leave aside its traditional reference to adorable kitty cats, it’s fair to say that it has two vulgar referents in modern English: female genitalia and men who are deemed “womanly” by virtue of cowardice or lack of physical prowess.

Where the second referent is concerned, I would point out that we have lots of terms that describe men who don’t measure up on the John-Wayne-o-meter. We can call them wimps or weenies, or, to dredge up an old expression now seemingly little used, “candy asses.” Candy ass (does anyone still use this term?) resembles pussy in that it not only denigrates men for failing to be masculine enough, but it does so with that extra punch with which vulgarity endows it. To call a man a candy ass or a pussy is to both describe him as weak, and to do it in a way that signals heartfelt contempt – contempt that “wimp” does not always imply.

There is a book out there titled Diary of a Wimpy Kid, but I’m sure we will not soon see a book titled Diary of a Kid Who is a Total Pussy.

What makes the insulting word “pussy” particularly pointed is its association with “pussy” in its other vulgar embodiment, the one that construes females as mere sex objects.  

Views on Donald Trump’s use of this vulgarism are mixed. For some it’s a positive sign, a mark of his “tell it like it is” quality. For others it’s just crude. I’m with these others.

Dirty words have their place, but it is one of the rules of our society (and others) that people should only use dirty words if they are truly angry or if they really like each other. On this latter point, I recall that one of my graduate student pals and I occasionally addressed each other as Dickhead, as though this were our shared given name. Youthful bromance.

Vulgarisms are often used to mark boundaries. Couples may freely toss around obscenities when alone (I’m told), but refrain from doing so when others are present – unless those others are their very best friends.

When I was about twelve years old, my friends and I entertained the fiction that we used dirty words (when adults weren’t around, of course), but that our parents refrained from such vulgarity. I learned differently when I began to accompany my Dad on the golf course. My parents seemed to entertain the same fiction about me until that day when my mother was shocked to find a scrap of paper in my jeans pocket in which I had attempted to illustrate the phrase “fucking bastard” with a simple rebus incorporating 1. a couple in flagrante, 2. a fish, and 3. a human derriere dispensing ballast.

This was actually part of a spontaneous game I had been playing with some of my buddies in which we induced general hilarity by constructing these ingenious messages for each other, each one more obscene than the last. I think I might have won that round, but, as I recall, our buddy Dan outdid us all when he let loose a series of flatulent bursts, like a rapid-fire mortar, each of which he followed up with a cry of “Safety!” As males of my generation may recall, you have to call “safety” after you fart, lest someone call “slugs” on you, thereby earning the right to punch you sharply on the shoulder.

I bring up this adolescent world not only for the gentle nostalgia it induces, but also because it reminds me of Donald Trump and his admirers. I think for many of them, their lack of skill in critical thinking has trapped them in a kind of adolescent limbo. When they hear him heaping contempt on Mexicans and suggesting that Muslims should be treated the way Jews were treated in 1933 Germany, their response is not, “Oh my God, what is wrong with this man?!” Rather it is, “Yeah, finally we have a leader who is willing to blame somebody for my troubles – and, best of all, he doesn’t care about political correctness!”

As though political correctness were the only thing keeping normal Americans from accusing Mexicans of being rapists and Muslims of deserving official discrimination.

And this is where public vulgarity comes in. For Trump’s followers, vulgarity seems to suggest a willingness to disregard customary niceties and “tell it like it is.” But, in fact, rules of public propriety don’t amount to a wimpy failure to speak the truth. They are designed to encourage reasonable and fair-minded discourse.

Donald Trump has clearly decided that vulgarity and bigotry are better vote getters than is fair-minded reasonableness. This is troubling, of course, but what’s even more troubling is that so many citizens seem to be caught in an adolescent frame of mind that validates Trump’s strategy. This is the ultimate curse of American anti-intellectualism: teeming millions who never learned to think like adults.

How Prototypically We Forget

Brian Williams is stepping down, at least temporarily, from his NBC anchor position. His sin was having misrepresented some of his experiences during the 2003 Iraq War. I don’t want to praise Williams or to bury him, but I'd like to suggest that his difficulties stem at least partly from an involuntary cognitive pattern I call “conflation to prototype.”

The prototype of any category (for my purposes here) is that member which best or most prominently represents its category. The prototypical 1960s band would be the Beatles, the prototypical dictator, Hitler, the prototypical 1950s sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe.

The “conflation to prototype” is a cognitive slip that occurs when an incident or thing or quality is misremembered or misperceived as the prototypical member of its category. Here’s an example from my family tree. My late Uncle John fought in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, one of the fiercest battles on the Western Front. The most prominent Allied leader in that battle was General George Patton whose fast and aggressive actions helped throw the Nazi forces back into Germany.

According to family lore, repeated almost every time the Battle of the Bulge came up in conversation, Uncle John was in General Patton’s army at that battle. But, it turned out on closer examination, that he was actually in the army of the somewhat less famous (and less prototypical) General Omar Bradley. Uncle John never lied about his action and rarely even spoke about it, but other family members, knowing that he fought at the Bulge, simply conflated his Bradley-led service with the actions of Patton’s famous army. And, by the way, hats off to Uncle John, who was wounded in the battle and received a decoration.

Awhile back, when I spoke to an old friend from Lakeland High School whom I had not seen in decades, I found out that I too had been subject to this kind of conflation. She told me that the word on me from my old LHS classmates was that I was a member of the Weather Underground. The WU was a famous, radical organization of the 1970s that used the bombing of public buildings as an anti-Vietnam War tactic. I was amazed at this news about myself and assured my former classmate that I was never part of a bomb-planting, leftist group.

I was, however, an active participant in and organizer of anti-war demonstrations on my California campus in the 1970s. And I did sport the long hair and pointedly casual attire that went with being a student radical. So on this basis, apparently, my old high school friends transmogrified me into a Weatherman.

We do this kind of conflation all the time. Even our racialized skin color code reflects this. Black and white are basic color terms found in all of the world's languages. In this regard they are different from color terms like mauve, chartreuse, and burgundy. And, when we try to classify people by color, we wind up resorting to prototypical colors like black and white. Actually, if we were more precise in our human color categorization, we would describe black people as dark brown, coffee-colored, beige, and so on. Then we would describe white people as pinkish yellow, beige, dark tan, etc. But we don’t. We conflate our categories to such prototypical colors as black and white – and yellow and red and brown.

Same goes for hair color. If Lucille Ball’s hair color appeared on a paint chip, it would not be called red. It would probably be identified as “metallic sunrise” or some such.

I also had a great great grandfather who was said to have fought at Gettysburg, even though, as I found out through careful research, he never got closer to the Gettysburg battlefield than my house is to Disney World ®. Though I bet some of my out-of-state acquaintances actually picture me as living near Disney World.*

My point is that when we misremember or misconceive, we often simplify by collapsing our information into the most prominent version of a thing or event, the one that most easily comes to mind as representative of its type. I’m guessing that Brian Williams “remembered” having his helicopter downed by enemy fire because he arrived at a battle site in an aircraft shortly after another copter had been forced down by hostile fire. The two events “My copter landed in a site where a battle had recently taken place” and “A helicopter was hit by hostile fire and forced to land at a battle site” collapsed into a single prototypical category leading Mr. Williams to see himself as a war reporter who actually experienced the dangers of war in a prototypical fired-upon engagement with the enemy.

Of course, I won’t deny that ego also had something to do with Brian's faulty memory. Who doesn’t want to see himself or herself in the most favorable or impressive light? Such a longing, though, is perhaps more typical of media icons than it is of the rest of us mortals.

*For the exciting details of Great Great Grandfather Flynn at Gettysburg, click here.

Je Suis Charlie (99.9%)

I have a new hero. It is Charb, the late editor of Charlie Hebdo, gunned down, along with several of his associates, by murderous thugs last week.

I regard good satire as a gift from the gods, but there is a rub, and it is this: I would not post or publish pictures of the prophet Mohammad.

I am not concerned about terrorist attacks, since I am not big enough to be noticed by terrorists, but I am concerned about courtesy.

Muslims did not invent their prohibition on depictions of the prophet as a way to challenge non-believers, and they don’t maintain this prohibition as though it were a chip on their shoulder, one they dare anyone to knock off. It is a centuries-old part of the Muslim faith and it’s one I am willing to respect.

I have had heard ordinary, non-fanatic Muslims express discomfort over depictions of Mohammad. Their discomfort comes from their sense that an important religious taboo is being violated. I would guess that their feeling is similar to that felt by many Christians when Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ depicted Jesus being tempted by sexual fantasies.

So, though I certainly don’t want to see laws prohibiting Charlie Hebdo-type satire, I am unwilling to identify with its more rude and disrespectful aspects.

To me, avoiding intentional insults to religious beliefs is similar to avoiding ethnic or racial slurs. I don’t believe in insulting or disparaging individuals by throwing around the infamous n-word, and I don’t feel my freedom is being drastically curtailed by my restraint on this point. To me it’s more a matter of common decency rather than overly timid political correctness.

Certain words embody an element of viciousness that comes from their reflection of real, non-verbal injuries. To verbally target someone whose people have been routinely and heavily victimized by discrimination is to blast them with society’s heavy artillery. Certain ethnic groups – Black, Hispanic, Polish, etc. – have been systematically injured for decades or even centuries, and what they have suffered is embodied in the terms (Polack, beaner, and so on) that some mainstream Americans use to disparage them. When a white bigot calls a black man by the abusive “n-word,” he dredges up the socially entrenched mentality that has injured African-Americans for centuries and essentially gloats over it. He is, in a sense, kicking someone who is down. These are the kinds of words that, like sticks and stones, do break deeply embedded psychological bones. Their poison will endure as long as the social inequality they celebrate endures.

In contrast, there is no epithet that an African-American or a Mexican can throw back at a white person in this country that carries the sting of entrenched social inequality. Words like gringo and cracker are all but harmless here.

The same can be said in male-female verbal relations. There is a long-entrenched social sensibility that says women should restrain themselves in their sexual behavior; if they don’t they can be injured with labels like slut or whore, labels that have no equally injurious male versions.

And then there is the nuclear option: cunt. Here is a term designed to injure females by reminding them of their vulnerability in the areas of both sexuality and assertiveness. To call a woman a cunt is to say, “You are female and the whole world says your (sexual and/or assertive) behavior sucks!”

There is no male equivalent because there is no equivalent socially entrenched value that undermines the sexual and assertive behavior of males.

Refraining from ethnic, racial or gender-based slurs, or from intentional religious insults, does not make me feel as though my free speech has been impaired. It just makes me feel respectful.

And - Vive Charlie Hebdo!