The very fine piece of soon-to-be published literary nonfiction had me drawn deeper into its narrative with every page. Then, on Page 53, the author did something that destroyed the vérité mode he'd painstakingly created: In recounting a workplace argument from decades gone by, the writer began attaching the modifier "bleeping" to various quoted nouns. The prose contained exclamation points and other clues intended to guide, but I found the passage to be beyond distraction regardless. A potential deal-breaker. The word "bleeping" has not once passed my lips. And I'm one cussin' motherfucker.
Niggas got hard-core Internet sex pop-ups. South Park and Sex and the City are in syndication. Casual access to the porn of war is but a point-and-click away. And somehow the world of print media—consumers and producers—remains stunningly skittish about profanity. Ellipses, bracketed explanations and other avenues of mediation continue to occupy a quaint space where folks pretend there's a causal relationship between pristine language and morality.
Now, the fact of this space's preservation provokes two questions: What is it about cuss words that remains so incendiary when mucho other shit—terrorism, environmental decay, piss-poor schools—demand the sort of visceral outrage profanity allegedly provokes? And if we can't have "bad words," what are we missing?
First part first: It used to be an adage that profanity predicts puny intellect, but Scorsese and Coppola deaded that business three decades back. We're much more aware that smart people cuss than we are that, for example, many successful people smoke marijuana.
I've spent a good amount of time in locker rooms. These secret places are where pure human striving gets prepped—alliances are formed, game plans hatched—and they are greenhouses of profanity. Doesn't matter if you're a God-squad jock or a hip-hop clone, yer fuckin' cussin. All mouths be potty.
Now, why do athletes need this form of expression? Because their shit is mad hard. Competitive sport demands that participants give every aspect of their beings and that jocks experience painful extremes. "Fuck," "shit" and "goddamnit" go a long way toward alleviating stress. But get most of the sports set on the record and the entire tenor of speech changes, at least partially in anticipation of the censorship that's bound to occur. And we regard this turn for the oblique as admirable. We say it's for the children.
That's not really so. The genie is mostly out of the bottle. Some of the action on Nickelodeon would have been PG-13 when my balls were smooth and hairless, but that rating didn't exist then—and never mind commercials. And that's fine. Supremely earthly words give away no classified information, transmit no disease. Saying them feels fuckin' awesome, and they don't cost nothin'.
Dare I say that it feels righteous for us to have unfettered access to this kind of expression. After all, we're working ridiculous hours for stagnant wages. We got stress like cousins on meth and health-care plans that are all-the-way ass. Why are we less deserving than Bobby Knight?
One problem: This notion assumes a kind of parity that's incongruent with our capitalist framework. Basically, the matter is an inside-outside deal. If you are inside the locker room/closed city-council session/board of directors meeting, you can have unashamed access to this therapeutic language. Only, the profanity is to be checked at the exit. (A good example is the much-circulated feed footage of President Bush flipping off a studio camera [and implied audience] prior to reading a prepared script.) The electorate/audience might be worked into a lather if the cussin' and the piety were all in a single gumbo pot. We might not know to think less of ourselves. And then where the bleep would the average American be?