By Jethro Maddox
Almost 20 years ago, I began collecting these finger puppets you could buy on line from the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild. The Giuseppe Verdi collection of finger puppets likenesses of Gandhi, Shakespeare, Einstein, Jesus, Dorothy Parker, among others. The likenesses were not half bad. Except for one. The Jesus puppet was a dead ringer for George Carlin, the famously potty mouthed comedian and social critic, who went on home and claimed his reward in 2008. I found this disturbing. Two of my favorite things used to be my bible, and Carlin’s naughtiness. This finger puppet ruined both of them for me. But if anybody put the topic of foul language front and center it was Carlin.
The Granite State has not been immune from the conflict. From Bow to Wolfeboro to Belmont local governments have wrestled with how protect free speech, and uphold community standards of decency as homes and vehicles are decorated with suggestions that our nations leaders commit physically impossible acts. It’s been 21 years since then Vice President Cheney told Senators Leahy, on the floor of the senate, to do exactly that.
Carlin would have turned 89 years old the day after tomorrow, and Jesus Carlin has been enjoying something of a Second Coming of late. There have been books, documentaries, and retrospectives. A few years ago a New York Times feature about Carlin was headlined “A Playful Provocateur’s Afterlife.” Carlin gleefully and profanely skewered organized religion, yet in a tribute published in Newsweek magazine at the time of Carlin’s passing movie director Kevin Smith wrote that Carlin “replaced Roman Catholicism as my religion.”
Carlin endures, but not because of any miracles he has been scene performing. He has disciples who cite his high energy rants as evidence that He “would have sided with them” politically today. Carlin’s autumnal angry man persona contrasted with kind and gracious conduct in private. It reflected disillusioned idealism. But like any well crafted Holy Scripture lacking context, Carlin’s words can be made to support any number of seemingly contradictory positions. There is no coherent Carlin ideology. He was very funny. He had a genius for confronting the misuse of language and the use of language to conceal rather than illuminate. The potty mouth added nothing to that. What endures, however, is the triumph of what we used to call — when I was a boy — the “Filthy Speech Movement.”
Free political speech is in some danger today. Between Woke Excess and a humorless authoritarian federal government with power over corporate media licenses and mergers, popular late night late night comedians are being hauled off to the Tower of London, and news features crafted by such iconic institutions as Sixty Minutes are killed. But the Potty Talk abounds. Carlin became famous with his 1970s routine about the seven dirty words you could not say on television. Today governors, senators, presidential candidates let fly on Meet the Press with gratuitous sexual and scatological language. The middle of the road Governor of Pennsylvania, who looks like Clark Kent, campaigns on the slogan of “getting shit done.” Even the clergy are getting into the act. You can swear all you want now, but you better not criticize the government’s immigration enforcement, write an op-ed with the wrong take on Gaza, or call for a sales or income tax in New Hampshire. That will get you deported. I omit mention of the current President, in citing this wholesale departure from use of normal language, because everybody knows he’s crazier than a shithouse rat, but do we want to live in world where our children have to leave the room when the news comes on, where little Johnny hides TIME magazine under his mattress?
My Daddy always told me that swearing was not an admirable quality, not because most of us have not heard the words before, but because it was the sign of a weak and lazy mind. Swear and you reveal yourself to be someone not smart enough to express yourself with the right word. Others regard the triumph of casual expletives in public speech, without any sense of occasion, as refreshing authenticity. They regard any objection to it as priggish, and probably hypocritical. The sharpest drop in President Nixon’s poll ratings came, not with the disclosure of his Watergate crimes, but publication of White House tape transcripts, “expletive deleted” masking what turned out to be the mildest profanity. In response to Harry Truman’s occasional resort to expressions like “Hell,” “damn,” or “son of a bitch” Nixon once praised Eisenhower for “restoring good language to the White House.” Actually, Ike swore like a trooper. In private, Lyndon Johnson swore with a creativity and vividness that qualified as poetry. It was key to his dominance over the senate. In public, and on TV, LBJ was lugubrious and boring, and this played a large role in his loss of public support. If he had just publicly said he wanted Uncle Ho’s pecker in his pocket, we might have won the war.
We can turn to the Book of Carlin for Wisdom in this matter. Carlin defended robust resort to cussing as “the spice in my particular stew.” This is a crucial insight. A spice or a sweet is fine in moderation. But sweets and spices can be overused. There are times when resort to an expletives lends force or urgency to a statement. There are even times when a sexual or scatological reference offers a perfect metaphor. Overuse lessens impact, and even lessens appreciation. It deadens. It coarsens. It becomes a bore. In Jesus Carlin’s name, amen.