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| Lileks: Obama's "authentic" verbal expression |
| 2010-06-11 |
My nine-year-old daughter looked at the front page of the paper, and her eyes grew wide:The president said “ass'? She swallowed the A-word, because it is, after all, the A-word. I nodded; he said that. She was silent for a while, digesting the information. Presidents, after all, are part of the great Pantheon of Authority, standing over the school principal, teachers, the pastor, police, and perhaps the mailman. To consider them using bad words reordered everything. Unless … “He didn't mean donkey,' she said, this being the only possible explanation. I shook my head. It will now be difficult to tell her not to use that word; it will now be a matter of time before my wife says, “Well, your daughter was sounding presidential today,' and it won't be a reference to mankind's universal aspirations.... Barack Obama is probably the last guy you'd think would introduce “ass' into the mainstream political discourse. It's like Spock announcing he wants to “knock boots' — a expression both crude and banal coming from someone renowned for dispassionate cool. But the idea that the president should confine himself to polite terminology is one of those antiquated chocks that prohibit true, honest expression, and if the post-Boomer culture has taught us any-effin-thing, it's that authentic people use earthy language, authentically, and only the spats-and-monocle crowd insist on the verbal equivalent of the raised pinky and other useless vestiges of high-tea manners. Bill Maher took it a bit farther on his TV show, “This Week's Reason to Cancel HBO':...The gross reductive identification of race with gangster culture is permitted for Mr. Maher, since he holds approved views on a variety of other issues.... But at the heart of Maher's image of authentic blackness is part of the leftist creed: the trivial niceties of civilization are a barrier to the most important goal of human endeavor, self-expression. Lenny died for your sins. The hero isn't the man who invents the traffic signal, it's Ratso Rizzo who crosses against the light, bangs on a hood of a car that dares to nose into the intersection, and yells “I'm walkin' here!'... |
| Posted by:Mike |