Ascent of the A-Word Read online

  Those “horrors” were all productions of what Gurstein calls “the party of exposure.” Its program was played out in the high cultural world of the artistic and social movements that culminated in the counterculture, the New Left, the “sexual revolution,” women’s liberation, and gay liberation, all of them pressing for an end to the social and legal impediments to frank expression. It brings to mind D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, Margaret Sanger and Margaret Meade, Albert Ellis and Alfred Kinsey, Jerry Rubin and Lenny Bruce, Oh Calcutta! and Fear of Flying, and all the other modernist and avant-garde assaults on Victorian sexual neuroses. As Lawrence explained in “A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,”’ published in 1930, he had used “taboo words” because “we shall never free the phallic reality from the ‘uplift’ taint till we give it its own phallic language.”13

  But the story is very different when it comes to the secondhand vulgarities, asshole among them. Their appearance and spread had little to do with dispelling the shame attached to the body and its functions. On the contrary, it’s only because asshole is considered a dirty word when it’s used anatomically that it can convey contempt when it’s applied to an office martinet or an inconsiderate motorist. Hemingway, Mailer, and Jones weren’t interested in sanitizing fuck or asshole into cheerfully anodyne descriptions; rather the use of the words was offered as naturalistic depictions of the language of soldiers, criminals, or the working class in all its gritty reality. In his 1933 decision exonerating Ulysses from the charge of obscenity, Judge John Woolsey justified Joyce’s use of objectionable words by observing that such language “would be naturally and habitually used . . . by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe.”

  But, as different as the literal and figurative uses of these words are, most people have trouble keeping them distinct. That’s understandable, since the literal meanings of words like fucking and asshole continue to taint them even when they’re used figuratively or as epithets.14 Hence the controversy that began in 2003 when the FCC declined to sanction NBC for indecency after Bono uttered the F-word on the Golden Globe awards broadcast, saying, “This is really, really, fucking brilliant.” The agency staffers noted that their guidelines limited indecency to “material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities,” whereas Bono, they pointed out correctly, had merely used the word as “an expletive to emphasize an exclamation.” A few months later, not long after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction,” the commission reversed itself, stating that “given the core meaning of the ‘F-Word,’ any use of that word or a variation, in any context, inherently has a sexual connotation, and therefore falls within the first prong of our indecency definition.” But there’s a difference between what a word connotes and what it “describes or depicts,” as the legal definition of indecency puts it. Mouse may bring to mind a furry rodent when it refers to a computer pointing device, but it doesn’t depict one. That was the point implied by the New York Court of Appeals when it overturned the FCC’s judgment, pointing out that “fleeting expletives” like Bono’s fucking had no sexual meaning, so couldn’t be indecent in the legal sense of the term. The subtleties of these distinctions were lost on the Republican FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, who said in response, “I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ are fine to say on broadcast television . . .The New York court is divorced from reality in concluding that the word ‘fuck’ does not invoke a sexual connotation.”15

  The agency’s critics had a lot of fun with that position, in the course of things blurring the distinction between connotation and meaning themselves. The political blogger Daniel Drezner asked, “If I say ‘F#$% Kevin Martin and the horse he rode in on,’ am I obviously encouraging rape and bestiality?” But if “fucking brilliant” obviously doesn’t describe sexual activity and for that reason can’t be legally indecent, it doesn’t follow that it has no lubricious overtones. If a word is dirty when it’s used literally, then it’s dirty when it’s used figuratively or as an expletive—though that’s hardly a reason for banning it from the airwaves.

  As Martin’s statement suggests, people on both sides of the debates over explicitness have often had a political interest in suppressing the differences between the literal and figurative uses of these words. In the 1960s, some on the left incorporated sexual liberation into their political program and tried to attach a revolutionary significance to the use of sexually explicit language. As Jerry Rubin put it:There’s one word which Amerika hasn’t destroyed. One word which has maintained its emotional power and purity. Amerika cannot destroy it because she dare not use it. It’s illegal! It’s the last word left in the English language: FUCK!

  The naked human body is immoral under Christianity and illegal under Amerikan law. Nudity is called “indecent exposure.” Fuck is a dirty word because you have to be naked to do it.

  Rubin went on to praise the Berkeley protestors who wrote “FUCK WAR” on a piece of cardboard and got arrested, giving birth to the Filthy Speech Movement in 1965. In the process he neatly elided the differences between the literal and figurative meanings of fuck, leaving it unclear why, if sex ought to be pure and wholesome, you would wish it on the things you revile.

  To be sure, that was a minority view on the left. While the Filthy Speech Movement got a lot of media attention at the time, it was regarded as an annoying distraction by the leaders of the Free Speech Movement that engendered it; in a speech, Mario Savio couldn’t even bring himself to refer to a “Fuck” sign as other than “the sexual intercourse sign,” and indignantly denied that the FSM had anything to do with “the unfortunate sexual intercourse movement.” But others insisted that the two issues were intrinsically connected. Rubin would later write, “The Free Speech Movement was raped in the same bed with the Filthy Speech Movement. . . . It was an early sign of the split between political radicals and the hippie /yippies. How can you separate politics from sex? It’s all the same thing. . . . Puritanism leads us to Vietnam.” It was a presage of the seventies, when sexual and personal liberation were disconnected from political activism—and when Rubin himself would wind up as an acolyte of est.

  But however dubious the logic of equating the sexual and expletive uses of fuck, the word is unambiguous in its challenge to authority. As the Students for a Democratic Society leader Mark Rudd explained in 1970 in the Marxoid jargon of the movement, the use of shocking language “had the advantage of selectively targeting established population elements: in addition to social-class differentials, young people did not find crude language as offensive as did older ones.” Within a few years shock language had become an audible stylistic trait of the movement and the counterculture in general. In a memorable scene from the movie Woodstock, Country Joe McDonald introduced his anti-war anthem “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” with a call-and-response: “Give me an F . . . Give me at. . . Give me a C . . . Give me a K . . .What’s that spell? WHAT’S THAT SPELL?” It was a connection between the sexual and the political that Lenny Bruce had summed up succinctly a few years earlier: “Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.”

  The Rediscovery of Civility

  The defenders of the established order had their own reasons for linking the literal and figurative meanings of these words. The counterculture’s penchant for using obscenities made it easy to link the promiscuity, drug use, and unkempt personal appearance of the youth with their radicalism and their contempt for traditional values (another phrase that worked its way into political language around this time). Their critics contended, not without reason, that the sorts of people who would speak freely about fucking were exactly the sorts who would yell “Fuck you!” at the representatives of authority. After Mayor Daley’s police attacked demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the eventual nominee, Hubert Humphrey, justified thei
r actions by saying, “The obscenity, the profanity, the filth that was uttered night after night in front of the hotels was an insult to every woman, every mother, every daughter, indeed, every human being. . . . You’d put anybody in jail for that kind of talk.”

  The desire to connect the demonstrators’ personal behavior and political views had notable linguistic consequence, one curiously connected to the adoption of asshole. It provided the motive for reintroducing the notion of “civility” into public life, setting in motion the politicization of personal life that would become a signal feature of the era. People today invariably speak of civility as an antique and eternal virtue—the assumption you have to make about any virtue if you’re going to go on to perceive a decline in it. It’s true that the words civility and incivility themselves go back to the Renaissance, and modern writers often take them back still further, pointing out that civility is derived from the Latin word for city and related to civilization. George Will’s explanation is typical: “Manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

  But whatever their remote etymologies, the connection of civility and incivility to public life was lost sight of several hundred years ago. To Victorians, incivility suggested merely an impertinent coachman or a stall-keeper who addressed one as “boss” rather than “sir.” Writing in 1839, Thomas De Quincey ranked it as a vice that fell somewhere between procrastination and Sabbath-breaking on a scale of gravity. By the early twentieth century civility was merely a genteel term for a formally correct courtesy. When Westbrook Pegler wrote dismissively of the “civility” of the newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, he was referring not to the president’s relations with the press or the Republican opposition but to his “suburban neighborliness” in calling the grocery boy by name. As late as the 1950s, critics writing about serious social concerns like juvenile delinquency spoke about a “breakdown of manners and morals”; incivility didn’t come into the picture. Indeed, when philosophers and social theorists began to revive civility in the 1950s and 1960s to stress the importance of rational and respectful debate in a democratic society, they acknowledged that this sense of the word was effectively obsolete. In 1958, the sociologist Edward Shils complained that “it is an impoverishment of our thought on political matters that this word has been allowed to dwindle to the point where it has come to refer to good manners in face-to-face relationships,” and lamented that recent books on civility by Sir Ernest Barker and Sir Harold Nicholson showed no awareness that the term had ever suggested anything more than urbane courtesy.

  When commentators and social critics disinterred civility and incivility in the 1960s, it was with a specific political purpose in mind. In their eyes, the social upheavals personified by the hippies, anti-war protesters, and campus radicals offered provocations that transcended mere breaches of decorum or anything that could be conveyed by pallid old words like impolite, rude, and discourteous. With its musty connection to citizen and civic, a resuscitated incivility implied that the demonstrators’ dress and rude comportment was of a piece with their attacks on the political order. In an editorial that appeared just before the 1968 elections, the Wall Street Journal inveighed against what it called the New Incivility, whose perpetrators included the student protesters whose “foul mouth ranting made a disgusting mockery of political discourse,” the “filthy hecklers who dogged the steps of presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey,” and the “enraged Negro spokesmen” who “denied any virtue in white civilization.” The offense of the hippies and protestors didn’t lie just in what they were saying, but in their repugnant personal habits and physical appearance. With their slovenly hair and beards and their deliberate squalor, the Journal said, they were showing their “rejection of and contempt for the world of decent manners,” and were assaulting “not only a political system but the dignity of the individual and human life itself.” Within a few years, the Journal had extended the charge of incivility to communes—“pigsties, literally and morally”—and to “ultramilitant feminists who blur distinctions and appear bent on creating animosities where none existed.” As the Journal’s editorialists put it, “In an age racked by violence it may seem trivial indeed to speak of the decline of manners. Yet that falling-off is symptomatic of a concurrent decline of tolerance and hence has something to do with the violence itself.” The connection the critics made between the radicals’ politics and their uninhibited language helped establish a persistent assumption that the modern upsurge of vulgarity was rooted in the counterculture and left-wing rage.16

  At the time, though, the liberal establishment was no less alarmed by the tenor and language of the sixties movements, particularly on campus. In an effort to be even-handed, the New York Times acknowledged the short-sightedness of university leadership, but nonetheless declared that the protesters were “contemptuous . . . of the basic rules of civility” In 1969 alone, civility and incivility appeared in more Times editorials than they had in the previous half-century, almost all of them dealing with campus turbulence. In subsequent years, the Times extended the words to cover both inner-city riots and cross-burnings and the everyday courtesies expected between people waiting in line for movies. By the Clinton years, the words were fifteen times as frequent in the press as they had been during Eisenhower’s presidency; in 2004, one dictionary website picked incivility as word of the year, ahead of blogosphere, flip-flop, and Red States/Blue States.

  It’s not a coincidence that the new sense of incivility emerged at the same time that asshole came of age as a reproach for social misconduct. True, the words entered the language from opposite directions: the reinvented incivility was the conscious creation of social critics and polemicists, while asshole bubbled up from working-class slang. But civility and incivility, like asshole, were a response to the cultural upheavals of the moment, and presumed the same rejection of traditional values. For all that people invariably speak of civility as an abiding virtue, in its new guise it’s actually a sharp break with the past. To evoke civility is to presuppose that old-fashioned manners and politeness aren’t morally compelling by themselves, a point writers invariably acknowledge in the way they define the notion:Civility is more than mere politeness or courtesy; it is an active consideration of others in one’s actions and thoughts.

  Intellectual civility is not a matter of mere courtesy, but arises from a sense that communication itself requires honoring others’ views . . .

  Don’t let people confuse civility with goody two-shoes niceness and mere etiquette. Civility is a robust, tough, substantive civic virtue.

  The giveaway here isn’t “more than” but “mere.” It’s fair to say civility isn’t reducible to politeness or manners, but social critics in other times would have been disconcerted to hear moralists disparaging the latter. An age in which even moralists can speak of “mere manners” and “mere courtesy” is very different from the one that preceded it, despite the specious continuity of values that “civility” is supposed to provide. The reinvention of civility and incivility implicitly conceded that authenticity and honesty took precedence over artifice, simulation, or “goody two-shoes niceness and mere etiquette”—a conception of social virtue that was more in sync with the sensibilities that took root in the sixties and seventies than with those of the Eisenhower years.17 But this is an age, after all, when America’s best-known etiquette advisor calls herself Miss Manners and wears a camped-up high lace collar to preemptively neutralize the precious stereotypes that “manners” and “etiquette” can evoke. Indeed, the civilitarians’ persistent references to “mere manners” convey exactly the same dismissive view of the conventional rules of decorum that the sarcastic “Mind your manners, asshole” does.

  But there the resemblance between incivility and asshole fades. The words are different not just in the company they keep, but in their breadth of application. The point of incivility is to span the distincti
on between the private and the political and to blur the lines between moral categories. That’s how the word comes by its remarkable expansiveness, where it can apply to anything from failing to refill the photocopier tray to burning a Koran or describing a political opponent with a racist or ethnic slur. As the philosopher Cheshire Calhoun has pointed out, incivility is different from the name of any other vice in being “universally applicable to virtually any example of moral or mannerly misbehavior.” By contrast, asshole signals in its very form that it shouldn’t be used in polite discourse and that it should refer only to the perpetrators of slights that occur in the course of personal interaction, whether cutting into the left-turn lane or speaking abusively to an employee. Indeed, the way you turn your political adversaries into assholes is by subordinating their political views to their personal defects: depicting liberals as effete snobs or conservatives as heartless louts.

  Above all, the words tell different stories. The reinvention of incivility was part of a conscious effort to give a political meaning to the cultural changes of the era. Whereas when asshole entered our everyday moral vocabulary, it was as an organic process which had less to do with the political agitation and ferment of the sixties than with the decade’s stylistic innovation—and which in the end, among many other things, reduced much of politics to a form of cultural play.

  chapter four

  The Asshole Comes of Age