WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE !!

A crappie

When was a little kid, I was eager for words.  One day I was walking with my mother on the bank of a river with a lot of dead fish.  I said, “This is a crappy beach!”  

My mother was amused.  “Do you know what that word means?”

“A crappy is a kind of fish,” I instructed her.

Another time the big boy across the street, whom I followed with adoring attention, tried to get rid of me by using a piece of red brick to print a four letter word on the pavement.  It started with “F.”  I sounded it out.  “That’s not even a word,” I complained.  “It doesn’t mean anything.”  

“Go ask your mother what it means,” he sneered.

Teaching 7^th graders whose hormones have kicked in means self-censoring for the sake of making progress in spite of the great obsession of sex.  Try asking for examples of infinitives and you will get “to poke,” “to screw,” “to ball,” etc.  If you object, you’ll get nothing but blank innocence.

Teaching cross-culture presents another problem.  The Blackfeet 7^th grade boys began shouting a Blackfeet word at each other in the hallway, with great hilarity and quick looks to see whether I were listening.  I took the word to our older female Blackfeet speaker to see what it meant.  Female parts “down there.”  I cornered the shouters and informed them it was not a nice word.  (What made me think THAT?)  “It means vagina,” I said.

Now they were stumped.  “What’s a vagina?” they asked.  I lost patience.  “A cunt.”  “Oh.”  

Of course, “The Vagina Dialogues” was once meant to be shocking but not TOO shocking.  The play is not “The Cunt Dialogues.”  Is a phrase like “the hairy oyster” shocking or just puzzling?  Is all this gynephobic?

by Banksy

Is Apple Computers obscene?  Jony Ive, the new head, is being interviewed.  The journalist says, “That office has a Playmobil likeness of Ive, a Banksy print of the Queen with the face of a chimpanzee, and a poster saying ‘believe in your fucking self. Stay up all fucking night ... think about all the fucking possibilities.’”  Is that acceptable or is that lamentable (something like the culture of ZITS, the comic strip), or should the police go into the main office of Apple and tear those images off the wall?  I remind you that Apple has just replaced ATand T on the stock market indicator.

A helpful counselor once told me I was counterphobic, meaning that when I see something scary or maybe just troublesome or maybe intriguing, I go towards it.  This gets me into a lot of trouble but it means my horizons are as jagged as mountains.  I came to the rez half-a-century ago, I started reading the blogging of Tim Barrus eight years ago, I read all about sex and I mean “molecularly” though I really like Gene Robinson’s writing, I went door-to-door as an officer in a city, and tried to respond to the members of UU’s congregations who are highly assorted.  (Well, in a couple of dimensions, not all.)  This has doubled my vocabulary.  (The trouble with theological vocabulary is that only seminary grads understand the concepts.  That's on purpose.)

But the hardest population, the one that really tries to shut me up, is my family, esp. the ones in my generation.  They learned from our parent generation that the way to be safe is to be respectable, prosperous, and conforming.  They do not know they are these things or that they have not been safe.  They do something like a “pay wall,” paid with conforming, as well as simply “not knowing.”  People die, are born, marry, have heart attacks -- I’m not told because “we didn’t want you to feel bad.”  If I start being too uncomfortable to them, they stop emailing.

When the most prosperous come to visit, they are horrified, because I do not fit them.  The suburban engineer brought a bottle of wine as a hostess gift.  I do not drink -- never have.  Our grandmother was WCTU.  Their son is alcoholic to the point of not holding a job, not being able to pass classes, living in his parents’ basement in middle age.  They don’t see the connection.  But they endlessly read about the problem.  

I try not to say “fuck” when nice people are around unless they are under thirty.  The word is a marker for nasty people who probably even “do it,” even without purple pills.  I haven’t done it for decades but I come from the time when Bergen Evans tried valiantly to put cursing into proportion and so did George Carlin.  Evans was interested in the split in early Brit culture when the upper classes tried to be French (venison and swine) while the lower classes spoke Anglo-Saxon (deer and pigs -- also shit, cunt, fuck and prick -- they liked words with final plosive consonants).  He was well-aware that the REALLY wicked stuff was in Latin. 

I once told a high school class that they could say all their bad words if they used the Latin to name the not-nice fact.  (Flatulence instead of farts, for instance.)  This slowed them down because they couldn’t remember the unfamiliar big words, but it also led to some funny dialogue.  “Excuse me for flatulating.”)   Evans was interested because ’57-’61 was a time when new people were coming into the middle class, not least because the GI Bill was putting a lot of “salty” veterans through college.  It was also the thin edge of rock ‘n roll that would thicken into Marilyn Manson.

My ministerial colleagues decided I was “salty,” though at least one could match me sheep-joke for sheep-joke.   Will telling sheep jokes lead to bestiality?  (What actual harm does bestiality do anyway?)  The group that is most often offended by me is “at-risk” boys, who develop their own standards and don’t want to think about tubby old women knowing them, much less having opinions.  They stigmatize my demographic category.  

In my own thought, I’ve gone to survival as the definition of what is acceptable.  If language over-eloquence will help you survive, go for it.  But many have taken a position that they consider to be virtue when it is really more like “irreproachability” -- behavior controlled by the opinions of others, whether it’s being a litterbug or a fire bug.  If bad language will help me communicate with someone, I’ll use it.  But I’m constantly resorting to Google and urban slang sites to understand whether I’m being slagged and others are constantly coming up with new obscurities and shocking metaphors to keep me out.  Sometimes they denote activities I didn’t know were possible.

How can I be insulted if I don’t know what’s being said?   It’s attitude.  You have to “read” or “hear” the attitude.  It’s often double, both swashbuckling and serious threat.  Sometimes it’s defensive and sometimes it is meant to be traumatic.  Be careful whom you call “nigger.”  Even if you hear one black person use the term in friendship with another black person and you think you’re part of the inner circle.  

When it comes to Indians, don’t say “squaw,”  "buck," “half-breed,” “papoose.”   Don’t call me a “wannabe” because, like Popeye, I yam what I yam, and there’s no category for me that I’ll admit to.  (That’s not ending a sentence with a preposition because a preposition without an object is an adverb and an adverb can go anywhere.)  

THE USES OF OBSCENITY

Most of the research materials that I want to read are behind “pay fences” which is the new academic way of shutting out “ordinary people who might misunderstand.”  They used to just switch to Latin, but now even the elite are unlikely to know Latin.  So money, as usual, is the new line around anything “elite.”  There are a couple of articles about obscenity I wanted to read.

Talking about obscenity seems to make a lot of quotation marks necessary.  Like, what IS “obscene”?  In this effort I will try to define it by its uses and whether they are successful.  I mean, what is “obscenity” when kids on the streets use so many “uck” words that they sound like ducks, but CEOs can destroy the lives of millions of people and get a huge raise that same year?  Which is obscene?

I just watched six hours of “OZ” because one DVD from Netflix came in the mail late and unless I stay in a certain pattern, I lose my project thread.  I’m watching so I can write about this stuff -- of course, it’s exciting, too.  I’m about halfway through the series.  The two discs were Season 4, one and two.  The language is the usual “uck” stuff with some dubious sounding slang that Tom Fontana admits he made up himself, like “tits” for drugs which appear to be cocaine packaged in condoms.  He says he did this because “real” street slang is so constantly changing that it will soon become dated and he wants his story to stay “current.”  Of course, as soon as the series aired, the street people, searching for ways to be themselves, began to use Fontana’s slang.

Anyway, I’ll just speculate on what I think are the uses of obscenity and check it out in other writing later.

1.  Since the French overwhelmed the Brits, the good old Anglo-Saxon glottal shock sound (“Uck”) is as close as we come to the original back-of-the-throat consonants in four-letter words that have been mainstays.  Also, in those days calling on the name of God was taken seriously, so the euphemisms like “gee,” “golly” and “gosh” had a lot more kick.  We don’t say “God’s blood” or any other parts of his anatomy now since we have been cautioned that he’s not a humanoid.  But this sort of thing, esp. glottal shocks, have remained markers of the lower classes, the oppressed, the lesser, the stigmatized.

2.  One of the strategies of the “lower” and “street” classes is to intensify their obscenity as a sign of boldness and defiance.  For the upper classes, esp. the academics, obscenity can be used as emphasis -- “it’s a fucking atrocity!” -- or it can be a kind of entitlement, along the same lines as being able to talk openly about sex because one’s professional and class status means one can handle such topics.  It’s a little like a doctor having permission to do things to your body that no other person (maybe a lover) would EVER be permitted to do.  Is there a more explicit and invasive rape than a colonoscopy?  Would you ever return to a doc who used profanity to describe it to you?

3.  So when the guards in "OZ" use language as "bad" as the inmates, it signals two things:  I’m so much better than you that I’m entitled and you are so worthless and deserving of disrespect that no one cares if I describe you as a “cocksucker.”

These are just language obscenities.  “Picture” obscenities usually concentrate on nudity, esp. genitalia, which we are not used to seeing and yet know so well that a quick few scribbles on a wall can bring them to life.  And they can convert to sacrality: the lingum and the temple of the phallus in Japan.  After all, it embodies fertility and intense pleasure as well as aggressive invasion and forced pregnancy.  Shit is more usually invoked than illustrated, but assholes . . .  there are a lot of them.

People who are suffering might resort to obscenity for complex reasons.  It expresses intense and exceptional and objectionable pain and indignities.  It jolts the systems of all present into a higher level of adrenaline which always gives more energy, more intentionality, near-martial action.  It calls for action from those who care, especially intimates, to DO something, to intervene.  It paradoxically says,  “I don’t care WHAT you do to me because it means less than the dog shit I scrape off my shoe.”  (Is that the origin of the Middle Eastern showing of contempt by throwing one’s shoe?)  It says,  “So you put me in jail.  You can’t keep me from talking, esp. if you never hear what I say, so what are you gonna do?  Cut out my tongue?”   And, of course, that’s exactly what happens to one inmate on “OZ”.

I was in the bank when the “uck” sound floated across the lobby.  I remarked to the young woman teller,  “If these kids say fucking, cocksucker, and bastard all in the same sentence when they’re just talking about ordinary things, what will they say when they REALLY need bad words?”  She laughed and so did the tellers on each side of her.  They know that obscenity is a generational marker.  Kids are used to hearing those words in their music. I did not say “cunt”.  They might take that personally.  By now “boobs” and “pee” don’t even sound like obscenities to most people.

It’s hard to know whether war or money are the bigger atrocity/obscenity.  Clearly they are nearly fused into the same thing, a bastard fucking machine of injustice, disrespect and illegitimate entitlement.  Who among the victims’ friends and intimates would or could intervene?  Who among the general public is even shocked anymore if someone calls a zillionaire CEO a “cocksucker,” though he’s swallowing the coined sperm of millions of people.

Are you shocked yet?  If so, maybe there’s still hope.  If not, what is the next level?  Tom Fontana has exhausted the potential of HBO permissiveness and the plot lines have escaped back into our real lives -- without the Shavian comment that justify their graphic portrayal.  So what can be done to shock people now?  Because will they pay for anything less than shocking?  Fontana is counting on the BBC, those masters of insane crime.

WHAT ARE WE BANNING TO KEEP FROM KNOWING?

Today’s “books” are so different from what we used to call “books” that it’s hard to understand what “banning” them means. How does one burn an electronic book? How can it be suppressed at all? How can issues like pornography be pursued when books are no longer local, which is the locus of most obscenity laws for the simple reason that it’s different in different places? How can issues like political points of view be controlled when there are so many points and networks of transmission that efforts at interdiction simply call attention to what is supposed to be suppressed?

The change in the nature of “books” has been accompanied by such a radical change in the marketing of writing (what we used to call “publishing”) that content -- which is supposed to be what is banned -- is almost irrelevant. In some cases the banning has moved to the new focus of many censorship efforts: the author. Why ban books when one can ban authors? The most radical and effective way to silence dissent is to kill the speaker. Fatwa. One needn’t even pretend to read the books if the argument is that the author is just too wretched, heretical and obscene to be tolerated.

“Quills,” the movie based on the Marquis de Sade, vividly and wittily illustrates this phenomenon pitting content -- irrepressible and commercially profitable because so many people are avid to read it -- against that which certain interests are desperate to erase, usually for reasons that have nothing to do with the official reasons, more to do with elections and laws. It was not that de Sade was writing about sex in a offensive way -- it was that he accused those in control of idiocy and corruption. (At that point everyone was a little distracted by mass beheading. Why resent the upper classes when you can kill them all?)

It’s been fascinating to watch the Native American writers who were untouchable in the years when they were politically correct (and there was profit to be made from them) now being accused of obscenity a page at a time. When books were printed and bound volumes, they were condemned in those units. Now that people read excerpts and chapters, it is specific scenes, some only a page or two long, that are the cause of rejecting the whole book. James Welch Jr.’s book, “Fools Crow,” a conventional morality tale, is attacked on the basis of one dramatic set of paragraphs lining out the major illustration of the anti-hero’s immorality: he hides in a lodge where young women suffering from smallpox are sequestered, slides under their buffalo hides, and takes advantage of their naked and helpless state. Sherman Alexie, once an enthusiastic condemner of whites in feathers who write about Native Americans, claiming they were “stealing his heritage,” is now banned for writing about masturbation in YA books.

When I was teaching, there was a story going around -- evidently true -- about a school principal confronted with the sorts of issues in the paragraph above. Almost daily a parent would march in and attack some book in the school library. So this conscientious principal would promise to review the book, get it from the library and put it in his closet to wait until he had time to read it. When he moved on in a few years, some hapless person opened the closet door and was buried in the avalanche of books. This will not be a problem with ebooks: just hit delete. But why not censor at the point of objection? If one is offended, don’t read it. Of course, a lot of people are offended by the difficulty of mathematics and a certain part of education is learning things one doesn’t want to know.

Popular opinion suggests that dirty books sell better, but those who are experienced (I’m not, but I know people who are) suggest that this isn’t true. For one thing many consumers have gone to the image -- not sepia postcards of sinister men wearing nothing but socks with garters and doing things that experimenting children might think of, but videos that mix violence with graphic closeups. Tim Barrus suggests that today’s publishers are neither subtle nor leisurely enough to indulge in the irony of hoping books will be banned for the sake of publicity. Ray Stark, who with his wife wrote a witty pseudo-memoir of a porn queen, confided that they made only enough money for a nice vacation and it was such hard work that they really needed one. The real action now is not in suppression but in disclosure: government intrigues, corporate malfeasance, secret war negotiations and revisions. We’ve always known there was something going on. Leaks are the new pornography.

In a world where Wikipedia will tell you all the things that we used to try to look up in the dictionary (with very little luck), and supply graphic full-color illustrations of genitalia, death and money are still mysterious. In the end “banned books” have been crowded aside by TMI. The sweet-faced girl whose mother didn’t want her to read “Fools Crow” is fond of obscene ghetto-blaster music.

So what can “Banned Book Week” possibly be about now? The same things that most human strategies are about: class, prestige, control -- all more closely related to money than to sex. Our problem now is not how to get past guardians of decency at major publishing houses. Our problem is how to find the things worth reading, writing that tell the truth even if it has to be framed as a fantasy or a lie to protect the author. Printed books were a three-handed game: author, reader and intermediary supplier of capital to pay for printing and distributing the actual object. Then the poker game became crowded: critic, official regulator (especially at the international border since obscenity is local), marketing specialist, and corporate investor. Now the table is overturned and we’re back to only TWO intact players: author and reader, though some of us play solitaire.

Now it’s needle in the haystack. The new currency is time. The aggregator and the curator -- those who survey and sift -- are more important than ever but there's no money in it. The author writes in images and sound as much as print. No one can tell whether readers are lumping or splitting -- are they now content to read what the trendy media suggests, quite aside from issues of obscenity? Or are they putting up their own pickets in order to avoid what upsets them or seems dangerous? Are they reading to escape reality or to discover reality? What are we banning to keep from knowing?