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.

Where Does Obama Belong in the Presidential Rankings Sweepstakes?

 Who was the better president, Franklin Roosevelt or George W. Bush?

 

The question is ridiculous, of course, because by every reasonable measure, FDR has to be seen as vastly superior to GWB. We are willing to concede, however, that there are those, so partisan, and so hostile to “government,” that they would actually prefer Bush.

Which is to say, evaluating presidents is a somewhat tricky business, though it is one that I find irresistibly interesting.

Wikipedia has a handy chart with which they lay out the rankings of our 43 presidents, using as data the judgments of different organizations that have attempted to evaluate them in the past. In other words, it’s a kind of “poll of polls.”

According to this poll of polls, Barack Obama comes in at number 17 of the 43 presidents who have held office. (As you may know, Grover Cleveland complicates presidential rankings by having been voted into the presidency in 1884, then voted out of office in 1888 and then regaining the White House in the 1892 election, thus becoming both our twenty-second AND our twenty-fourth president. So Barack Obama is our forty-fourth president, even though he is only the forty-third person to serve in that office. So annoying. Thanks a lot, Grover.)

But back to Barack. Number 17 out of 43 isn’t right. That would put him just behind Ronald Reagan (15) and James Monroe (16), and just ahead of Grover Cleveland (18 and 18. Again with the dual administrations!).

Barack (as I like to call him these days) is much better than this. I mean, is it realistic to say that Harry Truman (Number 6), Dwight Eisenhower (Number 9) and Woodrow Wilson (Number 7) did so much more for the country than Obama did? In my opinion, no.

Wilson, the last leading Democrat who bought into the Confederacy mythology, is already starting to lose traction and I anticipate that he will be downgraded in future polls. Truman was a good man in many ways, but he blundered badly when he cut our alliance with Ho Chi Minh and threw American power against the anti-colonial movement Ho represented. Thirty years and 58,000 dead Americans later, it became clear just how disastrous Truman’s decision was, especially since all Ho Chi Minh wanted was to be a neutral figure, friendly to the U.S. in Asia just as Tito had been in Europe.

Eisenhower’s sins were worse than Truman’s in that he cranked up the anti-Vietnamese independence forces by backing colonial France in the 1950s. Then he completely undermined the friendly relations we had had with the Iranians by sponsoring a coup against Iran’s democratic government in 1953. We have been paying for this CIA blunder ever since. I’m not alone in my views on this being a blunder. When former CIA director, Porter Goss, was a guest speaker in my class, I asked him if he thought the CIA coup that overthrew the Iranian government was a mistake, and he said, “In hindsight, yes.”*

Eisenhower also backed the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Guatemala.

Both Truman and Eisenhower had their positive accomplishments, of course, but neither of them did as much in the face of as much resistance as Obama has done. Truman desegregated the military, for one thing, and Eisenhower established the Interstate highway system.

Obama, on the other hand, saved the economy when it was in free fall in 2008-2009. His stimulus package not only stanched the hemorrhaging of jobs that began under President Bush, but it also saved America’s auto industry with well-placed government loans. It’s worth remembering that the beginning of The Great Recession of 2008 was very similar to the beginning of The Great Depression of the 1930s. The difference in the way the Recession turned out, as opposed to the Depression, is, above all, a result of the actions taken by the Obama administration. This alone should earn him a lot of credit in the presidential rankings game.

The other big thing that Obama did was expand medical coverage to millions of Americans who had previously been too poor to afford it. Republicans hated him for doing this. Ted Cruz in particular said “Obamacare” was a bad plan because people would come to like it and then it would be impossible to get rid of it. One of Ted Cruz's very few honest statements.

But other Republicans hated it simply because Obama implemented it. Since the plan was based on Mitt Romney’s program in Massachusetts, it is hard to see it as a form of “socialism” or “government takeover,” but that is how the GOP described it. In fact, a more socialistic plan would have been better, but the Affordable Care Act was the best Obama could manage politically in 2009, so that’s what we’re going to have to live with for a while.

Another major accomplishment of his is the drawing down of our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the Bush administration lied about WMDs in Iraq as a device to justify the invasion, and, since the occupation authorities directed their efforts at promoting profit-making opportunities for American corporations instead of with an eye to the best possible outcome for the Iraqis, the invasion and occupation of that country turned into a colossal disaster. The ISIS leadership that now terrorizes the Middle East and beyond is made up of the very same Iraqi government and military officials that President Bush’s policies pushed into the margins as his underlings fought to make Iraq an investment paradise for American oil companies.**

Bush’s blunders and his and Cheney’s duplicity about Iraq require a book-length treatise, but let’s just say, as almost everyone now acknowledges, this, like Eisenhower’s Iranian coup, was a disaster with long-term negative consequences for the United States.

Obama has been criticized for being so anxious to extricate our forces from Iraq that he allowed a very bad situation to get even worse. There may be some truth to that, but, it is also true that the agreement that led to the withdrawal of American forces under Obama in 2011, was signed by Bush, and was held to at the insistence of the Iraqi government.

Afghanistan is also a mixed story, given that Obama has kept troops there longer than he wanted to.

But in general I would give high marks to Obama on military matters, first of all because he is careful to think issues through, and always looks for a way to accomplish the most with the smallest possible commitment of military force. His forcing of Bashar al Assad to give up his chemical weapons arsenal without firing a shot is one example of this. Getting the Iranians to drastically downgrade their nuclear program is another.

People like Bush, Cheney, McCain, Cruz and others in the GOP think that hitting a problem with a big, violent military punch is the best answer to every problem. Or, in Eisenhower’s case, when you don’t like a government, send in the CIA to overthrow it. Obama is much more inclined to use intelligence and finesse, resorting to violence in the most limited possible way and only as a last resort – as he did in the elimination of Osama bin Laden.

Obama’s approach to international relations is orders of magnitude superior to the mindless belligerence we hear from so many Republicans. And really, miles ahead of Eisenhower – who, remember, has been ranked as number 9 on our presidential poll of polls.

One result of this is that Obama is respected much more than many of his predecessors on the world stage, particularly more so than was George W. Bush. In the Republican bubble, Obama is believed to have made America weak and disrespected, but some international polls by the Pew foundation tell a different story.

So where does Obama belong? Every expert seems to agree that Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and George Washington are the top three presidents, usually in that order. Thomas Jefferson is generally regarded as number 4 (Declaration of Independence; Louisiana Purchase), and Theodore Roosevelt number 5 (national park system, anti-corporate trust busting). I am inclined to put Obama at number 6, ahead of both Truman and Eisenhower as well as Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson (Number 8, but a brutal slave-owning, spoils-system-promoting, Indian abuser) and James Polk (Number 10, but a slave-owning, Mexican-War promoter).

Obama, of course, is not without his flaws. My main criticism of him is that he let Wall Street and the other financial finaglers who wrecked the economy in 2008 get away scot free. Maybe President Bernie Sanders will take care of that problem later on.

And what does the American public think of Barack Obama? Today his approval rating is at an unimpressive 45% or so. But this is not too significant, given that presidents are typically rated low at the end of their administrations, except when they are victims of assassination. When Truman left office, his rating was much lower than Obama’s is now. So, I expect that within a decade, Obama’s rating will rise and he will wind up being placed in the top 10. He may not get to Number 6, where I would put him, but I bet that by 2026 he will be rated as Number 10 or better. If there is any justice in this world, he certainly will be.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------

*For a thorough account of the CIA coup that destroyed Iran's democracy in 1953, see Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men.

**For a good readable account of the politically-motivated actions of the Iraq occupation administrators, see Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

A Few Words about Ted Cruz

At the Republican debate last night, Senator Ted Cruz said, “[P]olitical correctness is killing people.”

I’m sure that what the senator actually meant to say was, “Bashing political correctness is a useful device for assholes like me to appeal to the bigots in the electorate.”

OK, maybe not. Maybe he really meant what he said, even though what he said was bull hockey, if you know what I mean. 

In case you don’t know what I mean, what I mean is bullshit.

If Senator Cruz is really hostile to political correctness, he is hostile to a general sensibility that says it is a bad idea, even unethical, to disparage people using racist epithets and to otherwise promote negative stereotypes. If you think people shouldn’t be treated with racist or ethnocentric contempt, you too believe in political correctness.

Naturally, some people take the idea of universal respect for people too far and use political correctness as a way to strike a moralistic pose or to pat themselves on the back. Shame on them. But shame, even more, on people like Ted Cruz, who obviously practice political correctness themselves while striking a moralistic pose suggesting they are dead set against it.

Of all the people in both parties now running for president (all 1,674 of them), Cruz is the worst. He is undoubtedly an intelligent man, which makes him that much more odious. He, more than any of his rivals, reminds me of Richard Nixon. People who listened to Nixon’s White House tapes have reported with disgust that every staff meeting seemed to be focused on how to advance his, Nixon’s, political interests. Never was the issue of what’s good for the nation brought up. I imagine that if we could hear Ted Cruz’s thoughts, we would be similarly struck by their repugnantly selfish and utterly unethical qualities. The man just seems to breathe a raging, narcissistic ambition.

He has been called out for his declaration that if he were president he would “carpet bomb” ISIS. This is a lie. Nobody in the American military believes that carpet bombing is an appropriate or effective tactic. Cruz probably knows this, but in his inimitably sleazy way, he broadcasts his commitment to carpet bombing as a way to sound tough. “President Obama is such a wimp that he refuses to carpet bomb ISIS and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, but I will!”

When Cruz was called on his carpet bombing claim during the debate, he tried to double-talk his way out with this gem: “[I] would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops.”

News flash, Senator Cruz, the ISIS fighters are in the cities.

Imagine for a moment that Ted Cruz were a decent, honest man.

I know, I know, but just try.

With his intelligence and his superior debating skills, he could bring a lot to a presidential campaign. But instead, he insults us with a well rehearsed, thoroughly dishonest series of sound bites, many of which he himself does not believe, but which he has calculated might attract naïve voters to his cause. Gross.

But, you ask, doesn’t every politician do this? Well, except maybe for Bernie Sanders, I think they all do it to some extent. But Cruz is special because that is all he does. So now I find myself watching with fascinated horror to see just how high the Republican electorate is willing to lift this duplicitous poser. May the Force protect us.

(Thanks to Jezebel for the picture.)