Politics becoming openly profane

ROBERT GARDNER

Apparently, our vice president isn’t quite the gentleman we thought.

Unhappy with what someone said, he used what most people consider

the most vulgar of epithets. Now, even gentlemen are known to lose

their tempers, but a gentleman is quick to apologize for his

transgressions. Not the Veep. When asked if he regretted his slip, he

not only declined to apologize, he suggested he felt much better for

having uttered the obscenity.

Swearing in and around the White House is hardly a novel thing,

and it certainly crosses party lines. Richard Nixon’s White House

tapes contain a great deal of vulgar language. Lyndon Baines Johnson

had a foul mouth, so it’s not like it’s new, but it is ironic that a

leader of a party that prides itself on family values would use

language that many families still object to.

At one time, any form of swearing was completely verboten. Men, in

their own company, might be profane, but when a woman was present,

profanity was eliminated. Such was the concern that there was a

famous battle with the censors when they made “Gone With the Wind.”

At the end of the movie, Clark Gable says, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t

give a damn.” It was that last word that gave the censors conniption

fits. Letting such a word be said in a popular form of entertainment

like film -- it would undermine the moral foundations of the nation.

I’m not sure what finally convinced them to leave the line as it

was. Maybe they realized that, “Frankly, I don’t give a darn,” just

didn’t have the same effect, but the movie ran with the word “damn,”

and nobody fainted or even protested. Today, a movie with nothing but

the word “damn” probably gets a G rating, and the obscenity uttered

by the vice president has become one of the stock phrases of

screenwriters.

In books, writers made use of dashes for years as in “The

Virginian,” where Owen Wister has Trampis call someone a “s-- of a

b----.” That always seemed to me a pretty good compromise. Those

familiar with the term knew exactly what he’d said. Those who didn’t

undoubtedly spent a minute or so trying to fill in the blanks. “Seed

of a boysenberry?”

I remember when Ross Perot wanted to be president. At some point

in the campaign, The Los Angeles Times printed a letter Perot wrote

to his congressman when he was trying to get out of the Navy after

his four years at Annapolis. He said he was unhappy in the Navy

because his shipmates were crude and vulgar and used the Lord’s name

in vain.

While I heard a good deal of profanity during my four years in the

Navy during World War II, I don’t remember ever being offended. But

of course there was a war going on, and that tends to focus attention

on other things.

I had a brief moment of notoriety, if not fame, in the

judicial/legal world on a footnote I wrote in a case concerning a

home robbery and the profanity used. “It is a sad commentary on

contemporary culture to compare, ‘Don’t say a word, don’t say a

f------ word,’ with ‘Stand and deliver,’ the famous salutation of

Dick Turpin and other early English highwaymen. It is true that both

salutations lead to robbery. However, there is a certain rich style

to ‘Stand and deliver.’ On the other hand, ‘Don’t say a word, don’t

say a f------ word’ conveys only a dismal vulgarity.”

I might say the same thing about our vice president. If this is

the tone of our political discourse, it’s a sad thing.

* ROBERT GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge.

His column runs Tuesdays.