The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.
I always thought a United States president should be like Dwight Eisenhower. He served during my junior and senior high school years. A tough ex-Army guy, he probably cussed plenty when sending our troops to do battle. But, you’d never know it when he was in the Oval Office. Nary a hell or damn would be heard.
In the 1950s, late night TV icon Jack Paar walked off the set because the NBC censors wouldn’t let him tell a joke about a WC. That’s British slang for water closet (bathroom). Pretty rough stuff in those days.
In the 1960s, I was a disc jockey on the top radio station in town, KTKT. We played the Beatles and Rolling Stones. But, if the H-word or the D-word would have rolled off our tongues even by accident, we would have been banished from the local airwaves in a nanosecond.
Forget the F-word, it barely existed outside of men’s-only stag nights or smokers. Those two things don’t still exist, but I am not going to explain them. Hopefully you youngsters (under 60) have figured them out.
It’s amazing to think now that a movie with the violence of “The Godfather” did not once resort to using that ultimate cuss word. The record lately for a major production is “The Wolf of Wall Street,” with the “coarsest word” count of 569.
Fast forward to 2019 and my tender ears are burning. OK, that’s a lie. After 78 years, they are no longer tender, but battle-hardened appendages. The current occupant of the White House tosses out hells and damns like he gets paid every time he uses one. He’s even added the complete term for “BS” in his speeches and it barely moves the shock meter.
Apparently, that’s just a reflection of today’s society. Cable TV, satellite radio and the internet have seen to that. Nothing is off-limits. The F-word used to be the ultimate shocker, but now it is thrown around with no more thought as “gosh darn” was in days gone by. Just sit on a bus by some middle schoolers and you’ll know what I mean.
Can a comedian get laughs without the tough language? A talented few like Jerry Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan come to mind; the other 99.9% not so much.
So, where do we go from here? I supposed there are a few frontiers left that are untouched by the cursing of today. (As I write the word “cursing” I am struck at how old-fashioned and silly that word now seems.) Newspapers and network television, the two historic media giants that are suffering financially these days, have pretty much adhered to a strict language code. When a prominent public official drops the F-bomb, they turn themselves inside out to explain what was said without using the actual word. And, for network TV, “The Wolf of Wall Street” has to be edited the full 569 times.
Thank you newspapers and network TV for giving me refuge from coarse language.
I relish thinking about a time when our leaders offered us great prose like FDR’s, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Or this favorite Vice President Spiro Agnew uttered when he referred to “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
But, despite this column railing about today’s language, alas, even I am guilty. Last year I wrote a book, I rolled out a few F-bombs myself. Of course they were necessary for literary honesty and flow. Right.
