Our Cursed Condition Under Trump

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Donald Trump is responsible for what is probably the first instance of one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words being incorporated into a campaign policy position.Photograph by Thomas Dworzak / Magnum

Last week, the Guardian reported the results of a study, conducted by researchers at San Diego State University, that discovered what the paper called a “dramatic growth” in the number of curse words used by American authors. Books published between 2005 and 2008, the most recent year surveyed, were found to be twenty-eight times more likely to include curse words than books published in 1950, the first year in which data were analyzed.

“No shit,” a reader might at first respond, wondering if the article was published primarily as an excuse for printing words that, while no longer taboo, are still slightly naughty. The researchers catalogued the incidence of the seven words that the comedian George Carlin listed in 1972 as being off-limits on television: “shit,” “piss,” “fuck,” “cunt,” “cocksucker,” “motherfucker,” and, quaintly enough, “tits.” These words are still, in fact, likely to be bleeped out on television, or at least to cause an anchor embarrassment when a former President of Mexico makes colorful use of one of them while assailing Donald Trump.

But the notion that cursing is, if not more widespread than in the past, then more publicly acceptable, hardly seems to merit inquiry, even if, as the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Jean Twenge, remarked, the rate of increase might be higher than expected. (“To the surprise of literally no one, there’s been a huge uptick in the use of profanities” is how one Twitter user put it.) The report does supply a data point for diagnosticians of cultural decline intent on marshalling evidence to demonstrate the coarsening of the culture. As such, it can be added to an overstuffed file, along with Professor Twenge’s other current contribution to the national conversation: a story in The Atlantic, much circulated on Facebook among parents of teens, that asked, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?,” and answered its own question largely in the affirmative. But given the way the world is these days—the American President trolling Kim Jong-un with tweets that read as if they were composed by Kim Jong-un, while declining for days to condemn white supremacists after they marched in the streets of Charlottesville—one can be untroubled by the prevalence of cursing in books or elsewhere, and still be of the opinion that we’re all pretty much fucked.

As the study noted, contemporary writers of fiction now have the license to represent speech as it is spoken, and thus have been spared the embarrassment suffered by the young Norman Mailer, whose publisher insisted that “fug” would serve as a plausible euphemism in “The Naked and the Dead” when it was published, in 1948. Marketers, meanwhile, have discovered that profanity can be leveraged not just for art but also for profit, and that a few well-chosen curse words can bestow edginess on the blandest of products. Kraft had a Web-commercial hit this spring with a spot featuring Melissa Mohr, Ph.D., the author of “Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing.” Mohr calmly offered alternative expletives for overwrought mothers (“What the frog! You’re acting like flipping goof nuggets!”), and an easy dinner suggestion of Kraft Mac & Cheese for those seventy-four per cent of mothers—Kraft did a survey—who admitted to swearing in front of their children. And French Connection, the British clothing brand that scandalized shoppers on both sides of the Atlantic with its F.C.U.K. logo twenty years ago, only to retire it in the mid-two-thousands, has recently reintroduced it. This time, the logo is being hailed as a cute retro signifier of a more innocent time, and the T-shirts bearing it are celebrated as “the wearable hashtags of their day.”

In the political sphere, too, cursing and obscenity abound. Sweary politicians are hardly a new phenomenon, and the demands of high office may demand heightened, or lowered, language in response. Nearing the end of his term, President Obama confessed to Doris Kearns Goodwin that he had cursed more often since he had arrived at the White House than before he got there. (The interview was conducted prior to the election, and Obama expressed his confidence that the majority of the American people had figured out that Donald Trump did not have a suitable temperament for the office of President. That Trump managed to be elected anyway is one of the more cussed consequences of our electoral system.) In the campaign of 2016, profanity was not an aberration but a tactic. Donald Trump repeatedly told supporters that, once in office, he would “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, possibly the first occasion on which one of Carlin’s seven words had been incorporated into a campaign policy position. And if the admiring comments that have been added to a short YouTube compilation of Trump’s use of expletives are anything to go by—“Trump is a badass motherfucker,” one user remarked—his supporters see his earthy language as a laudable indicator of his not being a pussy.

Trump’s threat to ISIS was, one suspects, phrased in the argot with which he feels most at home—our President being a bragging, swaggering New Yorker, albeit one who since the election has preferred to avoid New York City, which voted eighty per cent Democrat. One of Anthony Scaramucci’s most Trumpian qualities, in his short-lived tenure as the White House communications director, was the vividly obscene quality of his communication: Scaramucci, another New Yorker, was a terrible flack but a world-class curser. (The relentlessly phallocentric imagery employed by Scaramucci raises the question: In an alternative universe—one in which a woman had been elected President, say—would there be a different metaphorical default? A press secretary who would denounce a rival as “cunty”?) Since the election of Trump, Democrats, too, have gone on the offensiveness offensive. During the fruitless efforts of Republicans to enact their long-promised repeal and replacement of Obamacare, Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, repeatedly characterized the proposed “skinny budget” as a “shitty budget.” “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse,” Caliban plaintively complains to Miranda in “The Tempest”; to which a political operative today might respond, “Fuck that shit,” and then sign Caliban up as a speechwriter.

There have long been debates about whether cursing is a sign of impoverishment of the language or actually an enrichment of it, and such debates seem likely to persist, even as the tenor of the public discourse continues to define obscenity down. Last week, Thor Harris, an Austin-based musician who has been vocal in his criticism of the Trump Administration and its supporters (earlier this year, he was suspended from Twitter for posting a video showing the best way punch a Nazi) announced that he was running for governor on a platform of increasing funding for public schools, raising taxes on the rich, and opposing his state’s attempt to instate a “bathroom bill.” On Twitter, Harris posted an eight-second video in which he stood proudly before a rainbow flag and announced, “I’m running for Governor of Texas, because, fuck this.”

His announcement seemed salient—and this was before a far-right militia mustered in Charlottesville, and before Heather Heyer was murdered by a domestic terrorist armed with a Dodge Challenger, and before the President spoke of violence “on many sides.” (Trump’s response to the crisis was at best pusillanimous, and at worst the mayhem’s tacit endorsement; it wasn't until Monday afternoon that he delivered a meticulously scripted statement condemning the K.K.K., neo-Nazis, and white supremacists.) Whatever becomes of Thor Harris’s quixotic campaign, his declaration of his gubernatorial candidacy puts into two succinct words a sentiment shared by those Americans who grow only more appalled by the unfolding Trump Presidency. The problem is not whether certain words should be or should not be unspeakable but that we can no longer find words to express our disgust over the unspeakable things that are being done in our country—this America that Trump has summoned into being with his words, and his silence.