While America has become more and more casually potty-mouthed, newspapers and other publications continue to enforce fairly old-fashioned (if arbitrary) decency standards (not to mention television programs – RIP, George Carlin). Here’s a Times column on this matter, spurred by the inability of the major newspapers to quote Jesse Jackson when he said he wanted to cut Obama’s nuts off:
The Times on Thursday devoted a column of type to the ensuing controversy and Jackson’s apology for what the newspaper called his “critical and crude” remarks, which included the bitter charge that Obama was “talking down to black people.” But it left readers completely in the dark about the crude part. The Washington Post was slightly less squeamish. It said Jackson suggested “that he wanted to castrate the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.”
(via LL)
The column also summarizes the Times’ various decisions about such matters in the recent past. It’s surprising to me that a newspaper would be squeamish about direct-quoting expletives. Regular readers of this blog (and those who know me) will not be surprised to hear that I don’t put a great deal of effort into avoiding the swears. I feel like focus on nice language is a cosmetic fix to problematic thought. Words don’t offend people. People offend people.
At the 1988 Republican National Convention, when George H.W. Bush was running for president of the United States, future president George W. Bush was asked by a Hartford Courant reporter what he and his father talked about when they weren’t talking about politics.
Bush’s answer: “Pussy.”
And on the other hand, here are some entertaining examples of how you can make something totally innocuous seem nasty by censoring it.
The ability to be explicit is essential to getting at the real, objective truth:
. . . truth is far from empty, as Davidson claimed; and the theory of truth is not “a set of truisms,” as J.L. Austin said scornfully. Truth is rich, and the theory of truth complex. This is precisely what we might expect, as the nature of truth touches on what is most distinctive about us. Of all the creatures in the universe who experience what is the case, we are the only ones who make explicit what is the case, and assert that it is the case. We are explicit, or truth-bearing and falsehood-bearing animals, and to see truth truly is to see ourselves truly.
(via 3QD)
Language evolves along with what it’s describing – the world is continually changing, albeit gradually:
Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different.
(via 3QD)
But really, when is everything not different? I don’t know where people come by their fixed standards for how life is supposed to be. I suppose most people think the way things were in their particular childhoods is some eternal truth for how the whole world ought to function throughout all time. And of course, what they’re remembering is not the world at all, but the peace of being a child.
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More things I don’t understand: on Jean-Luc Godard:
Richard Brody’s “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” is a story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey. Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers – the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, “Breathless” – became an intolerable gasbag.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been watching a lot of French films without comprehending anything about them, and I’ve heard film buffs scoff at the type of person who says they love Godard, but it turns out all they like is Breathless. So, um, well…the only Godard film I like is Breathless.
Apparently, the Brits are worried that they prefer dumb books:
At a Royal Society of Literature debate in March, Clare Alexander, president of the Association of Authors’ Agents, criticised a literary culture in which ghostwritten celebrity books, misery memoirs and Richard & Judy endorsements have “tainted publishers’ minds”. Contrasting the current British non-fiction bestseller charts with the more high-minded titles on the New York Times list, she said, “We have the stupidest bestseller list in the world at the moment.”
Wow. I can’t believe the U.S. actually made the U.K. feel insecure about its reading habits.
And to round out updates on the arts:
Canadian copyfighter Howard Knopf has suggested (presumably with tongue firmly planted in cheek) that recording artists whose music is played by torturers in Gitmo are owed performance royalties.
(via Majikthise)
Hang in there, Guns N Roses.
