I’ll never forget that first Thanksgiving dinner when my older sister, home for the first time on vacation from her university, inadvertently knocked over a water glass and rather casually exclaimed, “Oh shit”.
My mother and I tried hard to contain our laughter while my normally calm and liberal father blew his stack, and the meal ended, not in relishing the traditional pumpkin pie but in copious tears.
That was not the kind of language permissible in polite society, especially from girls and, more specifically, not from my sister.
And certainly not on the airwaves.
If I remember correctly, the beloved American broadcaster Jack Benny who each Sunday morning read the funnies from the newspapers to eager kids while their parents were treated to a little extra shuteye, thought he was off the air at the end of his broadcast and was heard to whisper:
“Well, that should hold the little bastards until next week”. That was certainly an exception to permissible broadcast speech.
We appear to have descended down a long slope into a weird and crazy dystopian world in which vulgar, profane, and often unconscionable speech seems to be today’s norm.
It was reported recently that in the first Congressional District in Maine, a candidate, understandably complaining about odious federal regulations from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) on the State’s important lobster fishing industry, proclaimed incoherently:
“NOAA wants to rape you and your family, and they’re saying, ‘pick a child.’ You don’t negotiate with a rapist, and that’s what’s happening.”
Some onlookers rightly called it “disgusting and unproductive”. ‘Rape’ is such a very strongly emotive word one would have thought its use should be reserved for the serious discussion of abuse and not bandied about for quick notoriety.
Not so in today’s “say anything” society.
At the recent Yankee-Houston Astros playoff, when the not-so-popular Texas Senator, ‘Cancun Ted’ Cruz, was spotted among the spectators, he was jeered by the raucous Yankee fans with loud catcalls of “Get the f*ck out of New York” and worse.
Perhaps as divine retribution, the Yankees lost.
And not everyone thinks there is enough free speech.
Controversial rapper Kanye West is reported to have agreed on a deal to buy the Twitter-style platform ‘Parler‘, billed as a ‘free speech’ app. He obviously wants to own more of the free stuff.
As reported in the British ‘The Week’, the app quoted West, in one of his normal understated pronouncements, that his investment will do nothing more than “change the way the world thinks about free speech“.
That would be laudable were it not simply an angry reaction to the fact that Twitter had closed his account and banned him from its platform after posting anti-Semitic messages.
West, also known as ‘Ye’, says his app will be “unconcealable,” unlike Twitter, perhaps a boon to free speech, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
His Instagram account was also suspended after he accused fellow rapper Diddy of being controlled by Jewish people and tweeted that he would “go death con 3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE.”
This was even too much for Twitter’s moderators, who might have been puzzled by the expression but knew antisemitism when they saw it and shut him down.
The weird expression, “go death con,” appears to be a muddled use of ‘DEFCON’, an acronym that refers to the state of alert of America’s militaries.
We should all be free to make anti-semantic mistakes, but it might be better if they weren’t so violent.
I guess I’m an elitist when it comes to free speech, which I believe should be free of any reasonable restraints in terms of clarity and language and honed for accuracy.
I’m a firm believer that accuracy of speech leads inevitably to accuracy of thought: Or is it the other way around?
“If the filthy commie maggots try to push their fraud through, there will be hell to pay,” tweeted one deranged Proud Boy during the January 6th insurrection, a cry hardly as likely to rally the troops or as memorable as the American revolutionary Patrick Henry’s stirring “Give me liberty or give me death!”
No commie maggots had been observed by anyone else, and what the hell does “hell to pay” have to do with it? This does seem to strain the bounds of elegant discourse.
Happily, it’s not all vitriol. There is humor too.
One of the funnier lines came from Stephen Colbert, who pointed out that much of the planning for the January 6th insurrection took place on Halloween, inspiring the punny: “‘Trick or treason’ he yelled: ‘it’s a booo d’etat'”.
Another late-night host roasted very’ roastable’ football star and Senate candidate from Georgia, Herschal Walker.
He opined that Walker was “closed captioning’s worst nightmare” because of his crazy speech and quoted this typical quip: ‘If man is descended from apes, why are there still apes?”
Actually, that’s not such a bad question. And it is certainly free speech.