Category: Language

CANCEL CULTURE: AN ADVENTURE IN MEANINGLESSNESS

Cancel culture has become the most insipid and meaningless term in our political lexicon. It needs to be, uhm, canceled. Posthaste.  

There was a time not too long ago, when cancel culture enjoyed a fairly specific meaning. Someone, typically a public figure, would say or do something offensive, usually of a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic or homophobic nature. (Think Roseanne Barr, Liam Neeson, Kanye West and J.K. Rowling.) Social media messages took out after them, calling for their contracts to be canceled and for consumers to stay forever clear of them. 

Although product boycotts and campaigns have been around longer than any of us, the concept of cancel culture, amped up by social media, emerged a couple of decades ago. Its roots, according to a Vox analysis, ironically stem from a misogynistic line in a 1991 film, New Jack City. In one scene, the protagonist’s girlfriend reacts to his relentless violence through a sobbing stream of tears. He immediately dumps her with this retort, “Cancel that bitch. I’ll buy another one.”  

From those humble beginnings, emerged an etymological metamorphosis that left cancel culture meaning, well, almost anything.  Republicans said impeachment was all about canceling Trump. Trump said impeachment was all about canceling his supporters. Democrats said Trump’s election fraud con was all about canceling Joe Biden’s 81 million votes. 

Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney was accused by fellow Republicans of falling into line with “leftist cancel culture” for her vote to impeach Trump.  The former president’s loyalists staged an unsuccessful coup to remove her from a key House leadership position. Cheney’s supporters labeled the move, “totally GOP cancel culture.”

It gets worse. Republicans on Capitol Hill spent the past two weeks in a cancel culture meltdown over Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. They are still ranting about what they see as a far-left liberal conspiracy to remove racist drawings from children’s books, and to transition Mr. Potato Head into a gender-neutral toy. In both cases, the minimal tweaking involved was the work of corporate entities in the finest tradition of the free market system that Republicans once worshiped.  

Then there is Jenny Cudd, a 36-year-old florist from Midland, Texas. After forcing her way into the Capitol on January 6, Jenny did a Facebook live stream to announce that she and her fellow rioters had just broken down a door to get into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.  She was indicted last week on five charges related to that incursion. Her reaction:  “This is 100 percent cancel culture,” she said. “(They) are trying to cancel me because I stood up for what it is that I believe in.” Jenny, of course, is free to believe to her heart’s content in obstruction of Congress, trespassing and breaking and entering. If she engages in such activity, however, she is subject to arrest. That’s not cancelation culture; that’s law enforcement.

Freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, insisted that she too was a victim of cancel culture when the Democratic majority in the House, along with 11 GOP members, voted to strip her of committee assignments. This rare sanction was in response to Greene’s social media support for the lollapalooza of political cancelations, namely the murder of Speaker Pelosi and other prominent Democratic lawmakers. Far from being canceled, Greene continues to serve in Congress and spews forth inanities on a daily basis.

Lest you think this propensity to attribute every bump in the road to cancel culture is an inside-the-beltway affliction, take a look at New York’s embattled Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.  At last count, nine women, including former and current members of his staff, have accused him of sexual harassment or inappropriate touching. The state’s attorney general released a report showing that his administration had underreported the number of COVID deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent.  An impeachment inquiry is underway and most of the state’s Democratic leaders have called for the governor’s resignation.  Cuomo’s response?  “This is cancel culture,” he said. “People know the difference between . . . bowing to cancel culture, and the truth. I’m not going to resign.”

It’s amazing the amount of work demanded from these two words.  At once, “cancel culture” must depict a presidential impeachment, a book publisher’s marketing plan, a Capitol rioter’s criminal defense, and the deletion of Mr. Potato Head’s honorific. On top of all that multitasking, the phrase is now being asked to save the political career of a governor credibly accused of serious wrongdoing. 

Linguists have a term for such overworking of a phrase. “Semantic bleaching,” according to University of Pennsylvania professor Nicole Holliday “. . . refers to the process where words don’t have the meaning they had before. (Through overuse) they come to mean nothing or something that is purely pragmatic, but not really laden with meaning.”

Oddly, this bleaching has removed all traces of red and blue from cancel culture, making it a bipartisan adventure in meaninglessness.  There may not be another force in the universe capable of creating a bond of unity between the likes of Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo in the way cancel culture has.

During their COVID war of words last year, Cuomo said Trump had been “dismissed as a clown” and was now “trying to act like a king,” adding, “The best thing he ever did for New York City was leave.”  For his part, Trump called Cuomo “a bully thug. . .who heads probably the worst-run state in the country.”

Yet, when the ill political winds blew their way, these two warring sons of Queens reached for the life raft of cancel culture. They both boasted of being men of the people, and thumbed their noses at the forces that were out to cancel them.  Said Cuomo last week, off a script Trump could have written: “I’m not part of the political club. And you know what? I’m proud of it.”

Here’s a modest proposal in the interest of national unity: We toss another cup of bleach into the semantic wash, and let Trump and Cuomo cancel each other out, both forever removed from the public stage.  And henceforth, we use the word “cancel” only in connection with an appointment, reservation or engagement. 

Imagine what that enormous reduction in toxic masculinity levels would do for our culture! 

POLITICIANS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS; THEY NEED TO STOP

Comparing Ted Cruz to a vampire  is out; comparing Hilary Clinton to the anti-Christ is in. Saying that Susan Collins is ignorant is out; saying that Rachel Maddow looks like Justin Bieber and should wear a necklace is in. Calling Mitch McConnell Lord Voldemort is out; calling Mitt Romney a pompous ass is in. Yes indeed, the hierarchy of vituperation has been reordered by those mavens of interpersonal communication known as the United States Senate.

Those outs came from Neera Tanden, the vanquished Biden nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget. The ins were from the mouths and Twitter fingers of, in the first two instances, Trump cabinet nominees confirmed by the Senate and, in the “pompous ass” example, from Trump himself, without a modicum of senatorial concern over decorum. 

All of those phrases exemplify disparagement through invective.  Such quips among like-minded folks may help reduce stress and win laughs. Viewed more widely, however, most linguists and conflict resolution experts will tell you that they are not conducive to crafting agreement among various factions (here, here and here).

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the Tanden confirmation battle totally evaded a serious – and long overdue – discussion about the role of civil discourse in governance. Instead, we got a Don Rickles cage fight over whose insults were the worst. 

Conservatives insisted that Tanden’s abrasive tweets disqualified her for the job because she insulted so many congressional leaders. Liberals trotted out a database of Trump’s 10,000 insults, along with impertinent slams from the former president’s cabinet nominees blessed by the Senate.  

Although she may well have been less offensive than her Republican counterparts, Tanden lost her confirmation battle over the slings and arrows of a churlish Twitter feed. In terms of distributive justice, the outcome was less than fair.  Others have said far worse and suffered no penalty.  

Yet, the saddest part of this whole episode is that it ended without any discussion, or even recognition, of the rampant degradation of political speech.  When our leaders routinely go for the jugular and deny or demean the humanity of partisan adversaries, they set the stage for the rest of the country.  That’s why, according to recent polling, 93 percent of respondents think incivility is a problem, and 68 percent see it as a crisis.  

The problem reaches far beyond the beltway.  A Democratic state legislator in New York tweeted this to a Republican staffer during the week before Christmas:  “Kill yourself.”  A  Republican official in Kansas took out over an American Indian running for Congress with this Facebook post: “Your radical socialist kick boxing lesbian Indian will be sent back packing to the reservation.”  

Then there is this tweet, from a Democrat running for Congress in North Carolina: “Screw they go low, we go high bullshit. When (GOP) extremists go low, we stomp their scrawny pasty necks with our heels and once you hear the sound of a crisp snap you grind you heel hard and twist it slowly side to side for good measure. He needs to know who whupped his ass.”

Apologists for this kind of toxic invective by political leaders are quick to note that the tradition dates back to the early days of the republic.  Thomas Jefferson reportedly called John Adams a “repulsive pedant” and a “hideous hermaphroditical character.”  Adams supposedly called Jefferson “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” However, without social media or cable television, Jefferson and Adams could hack away at each other all day without the rest of the country knowing about it. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, a diabolical insult needs to be heard in order to do damage. 

And that is precisely what is happening now. Incivility, according to numerous studies, is contagious (here, here and here). Many otherwise genteel folks hear and read the gushing vitriol of their leaders, and then slowly amp up their own tone and volume when talking about politics.  Suddenly Thanksgiving dinner turns into a verbal Battle of the Bulge.  

Even more insidious, however, is that vitriolic political rhetoric is seen by many experts as a serious threat to our democracy.  Jeremy Frimer is a University of Winnipeg professor who studies the weaponization of incivility in politics.  Here’s what he wrote: “Incivility can create a sense that subjugating the rights of a political party is both justified and necessary, and thus leads to democratic collapse.”

Think back on the political messages floating around this past year.  How many times have Republican leaders used the term “socialist” to describe Democrats?  How many times have Democratic leaders used the term “racist” to describe Republicans?  In our world of endless metrics, it is remarkable nobody kept track.  Yet, a pollster tried to measure the impact of those pitches.  The result?  Eight of ten Republicans believe the Democratic party has been taken over by socialists, while 8 in 10 Democrats believe the GOP has been taken over by racists.  Add to that a “stolen election”, one imaginary and the other attempted-but-real, and you will have the perfect case study of how incivility can take us to the brink of insurrection.  

That’s why one-third of Americans who identify as Democrat or Republican believe that violence could be justified to advance their parties’ objectives.  That’s why our Capitol is currently surrounded by National Guard troops and razor wire-topped fencing.

I have no doubt that Neera Tanden would have made an excellent OMB director. Her apologies for the mean tweets were sincere and unqualified, (an object lesson for Andrew Cuomo). Pardon my wishful thinking, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if this whole sad episode turned into one of those infrequent aha moments? There are, of course, far better reasons for our leaders to lay off the name-calling. But if losing out on a Cabinet-level position gets some pols to dial it back a bit, so be it. Whatever it takes. Inertia is a potent force, but we Americans have changed directions many times in our history.  It’s time to do it again.

Before it’s too late. 

TRUMP’S EXTRAVAGANCE DOES NOT EXTEND TO HIS VOCABULARY

If Donald Trump, God forbid, wins a second term, can someone please teach him a few more words?  His severely limited vocabulary may be the least of our problems, but the president’s propensity to continuously spew out the same monosyllabic mush is way beyond annoying.  

He’s like Mattel’s Chatty Cathy doll from the ‘60s. With the pull of a string, she would let loose with one of a handful of preprogrammed phrases.  And then repeat them over and over and over, until a highly agitated parent, in the dark of night, grabbed a scissors and silenced the doll with a snip of her string.

Studies have shown that most adults have a vocabulary in the range of 20,000 to 35,000 words. Trump, it seems, is limited to seven on a good day.   Well, that is a slight exaggeration.  Academicians who put their sanity on the line in order to scientifically analyze the president’s unscripted speech found that he uses 2,605 “unique words”, the lowest of any president.

That means we hear him spout the same utterances ad nauseum: “no collusion”, “build the wall”, “lock her up”, and “believe me”.  One study by USA Today found that Trump used six words more than 500 times while talking about immigration in 2018:   “predator”, “invasion”, “alien”, “killer”, “criminal” and “animal”.

In order to capture the full depth and range of our life experiences, the things we see, hear, touch, smell and feel, along with a vast array of modifiers that help describe them, we have been given an English language of well over one million words.  Because our president ignores 99.9 percent of them, he has to overwork his limited verbal repertoire, forcing a modicum of words to depict vastly disparate meanings.

For example, within a period of three minutes last week, Trump trotted out one of his favorite phrases, “very special”, no less than four times.  The occasion was a Congressional Medal of Honor Ceremony honoring an Army officer.  Since he was still basking in the self-reverential glow from the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the president reminded those assembled that the killing was “something very special.”  Then he placed the medal around the recipient’s neck and announced that “this is a very special thing.”  Introducing the soldier’s relatives, Trump said they are “a very special family.” He wasn’t done.  Trump recognized three Republican senators helping him with his impeachment battle:  Sens. John Cornyn, Ted Cruz and Thom Tillis.  He labeled them “very special warriors.”      

A few days earlier, the Donald called Turkey’s ceasefire in a battle he greenlighted “something very special.”  A quick Google search using the terms “Trump” and “very special”, showed that the latter phrase is not limited to military matters.  Former Playboy model Karen McDougal told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the president handed her money after she was intimate with him.  She said she refused to take it, prompting Trump to tell her she was “very special”.  

In a somewhat awkward moment at the start of the #metoo movement in 2017, the guy who boasted of sexually assaulting women and had been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 25 of them, was asked at a news conference if he had a message on this subject. Said Trump: “Women are very special. I think it’s a very special time.”  Two years later, the president was asked to say a few words to two female astronauts as they walked in space.  “What you do,” Trump told them, “is really something very special.”

Just this past July, he used the same phrase to create profound anatomical confusion. Announcing a new program to combat kidney disease, Trump said: “The kidney has a very special place in the heart.”  As powerful as words can be, they have their limit. To use the same term to describe misplaced organs, the murder of a terrorist leader and a woman who does not charge for sex is definitely pushing the lexical envelope. 

He did the same with “witch hunt”.  The term turns up more than 400 times in the Trump Twitter Archive. In a data base of his speeches, interviews and news conferences, “witch hunt” references far exceed policy discussions.  When former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain ran into sexual harassment accusations in 2011, Trump called it a “witch hunt”. When the New York attorney general went after banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Trump called it a “witch hunt”. When students at Trump University filed a fraud suit against him in 2013, Trump called it a “witch hunt”.  

Then came the Mueller investigation, spawning more than 250 tweets that called the probe the “greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.”  That designation was short lived, however.  In the past month, Trump has called the impeachment inquiry the “greatest witch hunt in American history”.

A recent addition to the abbreviated Trump lexicon has been, for obvious reasons, “corruption”.  Once the whistle blower report surfaced, along with evidence that the president was conditioning assistance to Ukraine on that country digging up dirt that Trump could use in his reelection campaign, a flimsy line of defense emerged: The Donald was pushing Ukraine to clean up its own corruption.

That resulted in Trump using the word “corruption” 29 times in 23 minutes a few weeks ago. Here’s a snippet from his rambling rant: “I’m only interested in corruption. I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about (Joe) Biden’s politics. . .I don’t care about politics. But I do care about corruption, and this whole thing is about corruption. . .This is about corruption, and this is not about politics.”  

Corruption quickly became the word of the month for him.  Asked by a reporter whether he stands by his personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, who is reportedly under investigation for his involvement in the Ukraine fiasco, Trump offered this backhanded compliment: “Rudy is a great gentleman. He looks for corruption wherever he goes.  He’s always looking for corruption.” 

During the Republican presidential primary campaign, Trump frequently boasted about his superior intelligence and spectacular vocabulary.  “I know words,” he told a rally in South Carolina. “I have the best words.”  What he didn’t say is that he can count those words on the fingers of his two tiny hands. Meanwhile, for many of us, there is only one word we long to hear from this president: GOODBYE. 

Now that would be so very special.

THE UNRAVELING OF AN UNHINGED PRESIDENT

Say what you want about Donald Trump, keeping in mind that it matters dearly to him. In fact, it may be the only thing that does matter to this president. The Donald traverses a relational line that is, at once, simple and binary. It goes from commendation to condemnation, from singing praise to a dirge of denouncement. There is nothing in between and directions are often quickly reversed. So too are the presidential rewards and penances that accompany those changes. Just ask Omarosa Manigault Newman and John Brennan, names you would never expect to appear in the same sentence.

Omarosa, as she is now mononymously known, has owned the news cycle for the past week on the basis of her aptly named memoire, “Unhinged”. In it, she takes a verbal machete – along with a tape recorder – to the president who gave her a high level White House job, a position that consisted mainly of saying nice things about him. Omarosa, a former reality tv star, started writing her tell-all shortly after she was booted from the administration last December. Why was she hired in the first place? As Trump tweeted, “She was vicious but not smart. . .but (she said) such wonderful and powerful things about me. . .until she got fired.” (Here and here.) The president, who once heaped effusive praise on his mentee, quickly reversed course, calling her “whacky”, a “lowlife” and a “dog”.

Former CIA director Brennan has only known one of Trump’s polarities; they have only spoke ill of each other. In the ring of alpha male one-upmanship, being leader of the free world has its perks, and the president used them last week to punish Brennan’s criticism by withdrawing his top security clearance. Trump was so thrilled with this new toy he’s made a long list of other current and former intelligence types he wants to use it on. And that, in turn, has alarmed serious policy wonks who see the president’s rush to silence critics as another giant step toward authoritarianism.

That may well be, but it’s also, in the nauseating expression of his sycophants, “Trump being Trump”. The Donald has always had his own ridiculously simplified version of the Myers & Briggs personality assessment. People who praise him are “amazing”, “tremendous”, “terrific”, “incredible”, “tough” and “smart”. Those who criticize him are “weak,” “crooked”, “low energy”, “phony”, “pathetic” and “low IQ”. Or, as in the case of Rosie O’Donnell back in 1996, a “disgusting slob with a fat, ugly face”.

Donald Trump is the same vicious, emotionally crippled narcissist he always has been, wholly unable to situationally modify his behavior based on circumstances. The only thing that has changed is the amount of power he wields. And that’s what makes him so very dangerous.

A recent story line, one which Congressional Republicans are refusing to touch out of understandable disgust and embarrassment, is that Trump shows his blatant racism by calling his black critics unintelligent. He’s labeled Rep. Maxine Waters as “low IQ” seven times this year alone. He recently called LeBron James and CNN’s Don Lemon “dumb” or “stupid”. He used similar pejoratives on Omarosa, the only high-ranking African American on his staff prior to her discharge.

In a moment resembling a Saturday Night Live sketch, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended her boss against racism charges by noting that he has also called a number of white people stupid. To carry this absurdity even further, the Washington Post produced a graphic tracking Trump’s insults of stupidity by race. The upshot was that he used that label mostly for white Republicans during the primaries, then targeted white Democrats during the general election, but has mostly aimed his low-intelligence barbs at blacks since taking office. They never covered this metric of investigative reporting back when I went to journalism school.

There is but one constant when it comes to Trump’s word choices. It matters only whether he has been praised or criticized. For example, he once said of Germany’s Angela Merkel, shortly after she treated him nicely, that she is “a really great leader; I was always a Merkel person.” Then the chancellor took exception with something Trump said, drawing this response from him: “The German people are going to end up overthrowing this woman.”

He called foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos an “excellent guy”. That was before Papadopoulos reached a plea deal in the Mueller investigation and drew this Trump tweet: “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George who has already proven to be a liar.”

Before former Texas governor Rick Perry started complimenting Trump, the president had condemned him with tweets: “should be forced to take an IQ test”, “should be ashamed of himself”, “failed on the border”, and “doesn’t understand what the word demagoguery means”. Once Perry offered praise for Trump, he was given a cabinet position by the president who heaped several paragraphs of syrupy praise on him.

When Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents publicly supported the president on a couple of pieces of legislation, he was rewarded with these Trumpian words at a Florida rally: “I want to express our deep gratitude to a man who has really become a friend of mine. He is tough. Man, he is tough, and he is good, and he loves you”. That was quite a change from calling Rubio a “lightweight” in 21 tweets, in addition to those that said the senator was “dishonest”, “a joke”, a “phony”, “scamming Florida”, “bought and paid for by lobbyists”, has the “worst voting record in the U.S. Senate”, and “truly doesn’t have a clue”.

Words mean absolutely nothing to Donald Trump. They are mere pieces of a bizarre Rorschach test, measuring his friend-or-foe assessment of the moment. There is nothing remotely relational about them. It’s all transactional. He thinks Vladimir Putin once said he was “brilliant, a genius”. That was actually a mistranslation. Putin’s terminology was closer to “colorful”. But it was enough to shape Trump’s mind-boggling pro-Russian foreign policy. The Kremlin hardly needs blackmail to curry favor when sweet nothings work so well.

This would all be amusing if the fate of our country, perhaps the world, were not at stake. We don’t need Omarosa’s book or tapes to know that our president is unhinged. All we have to do is read his tweets and listen to his rants. And then pray that this out-of-control reality show is canceled before our democracy is totally destroyed.

APES, CUNTS & TWITTER, OH MY!

What’s worse on the hierarchy of insults: calling a black person an ape or the president’s daughter a cunt? That insightful question is at the heart of our latest national conversation. Remember when our national conversations focused on substantive, compelling issues, like race, sexual harassment, gun control and income disparity? We are so through the looking glass right now, it’s hard to distinguish a Saturday Night Live sketch from the Nightly News. We have become our own parody.

Yet, for one, brief shining moment, it seemed that the hateful, racist, misogynistic depravity that has been gushing into our cultural veins since the 2016 presidential election had finally encountered a substantial abatement. A major corporation, ABC, acted against significant financial interests in an unambiguous repudiation of racism. The Disney-owned company summarily canceled the “Roseanne” show after its star, Roseanne Barr, tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, an African-American, looked like the offspring of “the Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, called Barr’s tweet “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” For at least 24 hours, hardly anyone disagreed with her. It was an amazing, almost redemptive, moment in our Trump-induced dystopia. A corporate conglomerate slaughtered its cash cow in order to take a principled stand against racism. There was no instant rebuttal from the right, no white nationalist defense of the centuries-old African-simian racist trope. You could almost make yourself believe that there was a national consensus that this kind of blatant, hateful bigotry was simply wrong and unacceptable. It was so pre-Trump.

Then comedian Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a cunt, and all hell broke loose. Bee, on her cable show, had shown a warm, loving picture of Ivanka and her young son, and contrasted that touching parental moment with the Trump Administration’s policy of separating children from their immigrant parents. Said the comic, “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child. But let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt!”

The Twittersphere was apoplectic with demands for equal justice for foulmouthed entertainers, an insistence that if Roseanne had to be sacrificed for her racist criticism of an Obama confidant, then surely Samantha should be fired for calling Trump’s daughter a cunt. Needless to say, the illusion that ABC’s principled stand in canceling “Roseanne” was a positive turning point in our culture wars, was now dead. What had briefly looked like a constructive consensus was now a full frontal battle between ape and cunt, a bizarre false equivalency between racial hatred and the use of a crude profanity.

The ensuing dialogue had nothing to do with civility or decency. It was all about politics, in the most decadent use of that term. Presidential Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced that “such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned,” leaving the door open, of course, to condone use of the c-word for Hillary Clinton, as many Trump t-shirts and campaign signs did during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself weighed into the battle, insisting that Bee be fired since that was the fate his buddy Roseanne suffered. That left us with yet one more unimaginable absurdity about the times in which we live: you can be elected president after admitting that you grab women by their pussies, but calling the first daughter a cunt is a dischargeable offense for a comedian.

Then the left fired back with numerous examples of Trump having used the c-word, along with the often told story of singer Ted Nugent calling Hillary Clinton a cunt and then being invited to dinner at the Trump Whitehouse. Moving right along with this scintillating intellectual exchange, the conservative surrebuttal hit its stride with counterclaims to Barr’s dismissal, including a Bill Maher episode featuring side-by-side pictures of Trump and an orangutan. As is so often the case with political discourse these days, the parties use whataboutism the same way a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination.

There is simply no moral equivalency between a brutally racist comment and the use of the c-word, particularly in this context since it was not used to demean women on the basis of their gender. Bee offered a sincere apology, as she should have. Her sin was not so much the offensiveness of the word, but the fact that its use predictably detracted from her overall valid message about the hypocrisy of Trump family values versus the treatment of immigrant families.

This is, obviously, a powerful word that packs a seismic etymological punch. Yet, it has not always been so offensive. In Middle English, the term was a standard reference for the female genitalia. The earliest reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the name of a 13th century London red light district street, Gropecuntlane. Chaucer used a variant for the word in two of his works. Shakespeare spun puns from the word in Hamlet and Twelfth Night. By the mid-1900s, the c-word had become quite notorious, generally considered one of the vilest of obscenities. It was used mostly by men to demean women, an angry, hateful, misogynistic slur, like “bitch” squared. That began to change in the 1990s. Many prominent women entertainers, prompted by playwright Eve Ensler and her The Vagina Monologues, began using the word, in effect reclaiming it from the misogynists. That new meaning was reflected in actress Sally Field’s reaction to this week’s brouhaha. Bee, she said, was “flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt (because) cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.” So sayeth the Flying Nun.

As the dust begins to settle from this latest culture wars skirmish, we seem to be in a pretty good place. Roseanne remains canceled, and an apologetic Samantha is still going strong. When it comes to evil, racism trumps obscenity. After all, cunt is just a vowel movement away from can’t. Now, there’s a bumper sticker for you!

TRUMP’S SECOND YEAR IS ALREADY IN THE SHITTER

As dawn breaks on a second year of Republican control, our federal government dangles from this binary precipice of indelicate nuance: shitholes or shithouses? Which term did the president of the United States use to characterize third world countries of black and brown people? If this were a movie, now would be a good time to locate the nearest exit and use it. Who wants to watch such garbage? Alas, this is no celluloid fiction. It’s our life, our new reality, a bizarre sideshow of existence that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

For those fortunate enough to have spent the past few days in a deep coma, here’s a quick recap: Donald Trump met with a few senators in an attempt to reach a bipartisan agreement on immigration. The meeting went badly. According to some participants, Trump kept complaining about having to take immigrants from Haiti and impoverished African countries he called “shitholes.” Instead of opening our borders to, say, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, Trump pushed for a “merit-based” system in which we would take only good, lutefisk-eating white folks from places like Norway.

Well, the shithole hit the fan, causing a cascade of impassioned statements of repudiation from leaders throughout the world, Norway included. Initially, there was no denial from the White House. That’s because Trump surveyed his friends who told him not to worry since his base will love the comment. After a few days of constant heat, however, Trump and a couple Republican senators who were at the meeting said the president’s exact words were not “shithole countries.” That created a narrative that Trump had been misquoted, that he never uttered the word “shithole”. It turns out, according to the Washington Post, that what the Republican senators heard Trump say was that he didn’t want to take in people from “shithouse countries.” A quick review of etymological research shows no measurable differences between “shithole” and “shithouse”.

Yet, this unique linguistic dialectic, together with Trump’s incendiary message that non-whites from troubled countries should be kept out of the U.S., is now threating to shut down the federal government. Congress needs to pass a spending bill by Friday to avoid such closure, and part of that package was supposed to include immigration reform. Some sort of deal may yet emerge, but for the moment the shithole/shithouse conundrum seems to have brought what’s left of governance to a standstill.

Despite headlines decrying the president’s “vulgarity,” his use of a four-letter word for excrement – “s***”, as many news outlets coded it – was not the offense here. What really offended, stung and hurt was his raw, brazen racism and xenophobia driving his position that our borders should be closed to dark-skinned people from poor countries.

No, this is nothing new. Donald Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans racists. He suggested fighting terrorism by executing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig blood. He has called black people “lazy” and insisted that all Haitian immigrants have AIDS. His complete list of racist credentials takes up far more real estate than is available here. The most astute and best researched analyses of the 2016 election points to racism as the most important factor driving the Trump victory (here, here and here). So why all the shock over Trump calling impoverished black countries shitholes?

Because Trumpism, in all of its vile and despicable manifestations, remains a relatively new phenomena. We still remember and cling to the real spirit and essence of the American ideal: equality, justice, liberty and opportunity for all. There is precious little on the national scene to feel good about today. But, for now at least, we have this: wide spread disgust with a president who vulgarizes those core values that make it possible for America to be great. Let us hope we never reach the point of NOT being shocked, outraged and saddened by the racist words, actions and policies of this president. Trumpism must never be normalized.

There is another reason why many are shocked by what we’ve come to expect and anticipate from our president. It is difficult to process a constant stream of horror in daily White House utterances and tweets. While we struggle to wrap our heads around Trump’s taunt that he has a bigger nuclear button than North Korea’s, we are hit with the news that the President believes himself to be a “stable genius.” Before we can figure that one out, the shithole story breaks. We are so busy processing all this really weird shit, as George W. Bush might call it, we all have different a-ha moments.

Except, that is, for the Republican establishment. It appears that nothing, not even self-preservation, will dislodge the GOP’s shameful and embarrassing enablement of a pathetic, solipsistic, racist president who continues to degrade the party’s brand on a daily basis. Congressional Republican leaders have had a year of way too many opportunities to cut their losses and distance themselves from a maniacal autocrat who never cared a whit about them or their party. Playing word games, and ignoring the broader racist message, won’t save them now. He’s their president. They own him. Let them all be buried in the same shithole.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES? TRUMP DODGES BOTH

Washington is once again awash with talk of presidential falsehoods. One Republican senator decried Donald Trump’s “flagrant disregard for the truth.” Another said the president is “utterly untruthful”. A neutral fact-checking service says close to 70 percent of Trump’s statements it examined were false.

Trump calls his tax plan a “middle class miracle” that will be “fantastic” for workers and make the rich pay more, when it actually does just the opposite. He says former president Obama never phoned families of fallen soldiers, when the record is replete with such calls. Major media organizations have kept a running catalog of the president’s false statements, now deep into four figures (here, here, here and here). Evidence of the president’s estrangement from the truth is so overwhelming, that a substantial majority of Republicans think he is a prolific liar, but still support him.

Yet, the Donald’s problem is not that he lies a lot. It’s that truth is utterly without value or meaning to him. The president is simply agnostic on the subject. Truth and falsity are equally irrelevant in his world. The words that flow from his mouth and Twitter app, are visceral, not factual. They are servants to his limited, binary emotional wiring: they either heap grandiose praise on himself or viciously attack others. It matters not one iota to him whether those words are true or false.

In fact, many of Trump’s falsehoods are not lies. Lying is a conscious act of deception. That means a liar must know the truth in order to deceive an audience with the lie. Think about some of the president’s classic claims: Mexico will pay for it; the New York Times is failing; Obamacare is dead. This is not a guy who methodically determines the truth and then disguises it with a lie. He simply goes with whatever jumps into his head, with whatever sounds good to him, with zero regard for the truth of the matter.

When, in 1972, Richard Nixon said he had no knowledge of the Watergate burglary, he was lying. When, in 1986, Ronald Reagan said he did not trade arms for hostages, he was lying. When, in 1998, Bill Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky, he was lying. These men knew the truth and strategically replaced it with a lie. They were not the only presidents to have done so. But Trump is in a league of his own. Truth does not matter to him. He doesn’t know what it is, and has no desire to learn. This makes him, as noted philosopher Harry Frankfurt observed, a “greater enemy of truth” than a mere liar.

Trump’s former butler, Anthony Senecal, read a published claim by his boss that some of the tiles in the Mar-a-Largo beach club had been personally designed by Walt Disney. Surprised by that revelation, Senecal asked Trump if that was really true. His response: “Who cares?” That pretty much captures this post-truth presidency. The leader of the free world, our commander in chief, the keeper of the nuclear codes, cares not one whit about truth.

Let me introduce you to someone who does care. Her name is Shannon Mulcahy. She is a 43-year-old single mother trying to support herself, two kids, a disabled grandchild, and two dogs in a small town near Indianapolis. Until a few months ago, Shannon worked at the Rexnord factory in Indy helping produce the Cadillac of steel bearings. She’d been there for 18 years. In an interview with the New York Times and the newspaper’s Daily podcast, Shannon said she loved the work as much as she did the good pay and benefits provided by her union contract. Last October, Rexnord announced that it was closing the plant, laying off its 300 employees and moving the work to Mexico. Shannon rushed to her car in the employee lot and started crying. Just like that, her middle class life began to crumble and she had no idea how she was going to support her family. Then came the tweets from candidate Trump, blasting Rexnord by name for “viciously firing all of its workers” and moving to Mexico. “No more,” tweeted the candidate.

Shannon never paid much attention to politics but had voted for Obama. Donald Trump and his tweets captured her attention like no politician ever had. He gave her and her coworkers hope at a time they needed it the most. “All of us were hopeful,” she told the Daily. “A lot of us there at Rexnord was thinking that he could actually step in and stop what was going on there. (If) he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants, right? I mean he’s kind of like a cowboy. He says things that a lot of past presidents wouldn’t say. The way he talked about American jobs and all that, I was thinking this could be the opportunity where . . . you know, a lot of our jobs come back from overseas. That would be awesome.”

So Shannon went political. Trump was her lifeline to a job that put meaning in her life and food on her family’s table. She conducted her own social media campaign on his behalf. She was thrilled when he won and then waited for him to come riding into town on his white horse to save the factory. It was like waiting for Godot. The cowboy never came. The plant closed. In a year filled with disillusion, Trump was just one more hard knock for Shannon. “After he got in there,” she said, “he done forgot about us and we don’t matter anymore.”

Sadly, Shannon, you never mattered to him. Nothing matters to this man except himself. Certainly not truth. His words have no shelf life. They exist only in the impulse of the moment. He makes us all long for the good old days when presidents only lied every once in a while.

TRUMP’S ONLY SUCCESS: LOWERING THE BAR FOR PRESIDENTIAL BEHAVIOR

If there is a twelve-step program for superlative dependency, someone should throw Donald Trump an intervention. Can you imagine his first support group meeting? “Hi, my name is Donald, and I’m a hyperbole abuser. In fact, I am the most marvelous, magnificent, outstanding hyperbole abuser who was ever born.” Needless to say, his road to linguistic recovery will be long and winding.

According to the Donald, every person he has hired or appointed is absolutely fantastic, even those he later fired or forced to resign. He claims (incorrectly) to have signed more legislation in his first six months than any other president. He once gave an unremarkable, but relatively gaffe-free, speech to a joint session of Congress. He claims it was the best oration ever uttered in the House chamber.

The same is true on the flip side. Trump never experiences run-of-the-mill adversity. It’s always horrendously horrible, beyond all compare. In what had to have been the absolute least uplifting commencement address on record, Trump told Coast Guard Academy graduates in May that he is the world’s most mistreated pol. Here’s how he characterized his allegedly unparalleled plight: “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Never mind that other politicians – at home and abroad – have been assassinated, kidnapped and imprisoned. Donald has to endure CNN and Saturday Night Live. Cue the violin section. Boo hoo. Boo hoo.

Actually, Trump, in many ways, is the most Teflon president in modern history, a rare superlative he’s likely to reject. Throughout the campaign, and during the first six months of his presidency, he got by with more atrocities, flubs and mistakes than any of his predecessors. Who else could have mocked John McCain’s war record, belittled a Gold Star mother and revealed a proclivity for sexual assault, only to go on and become president? Trump entered the office with an expectations bar set so low a Trinidad limbo dancer couldn’t shimmy under it.

Let’s take a close look at just one class of White House transgressions, and compare the repercussions for Trump with those of his predecessors. Numerous presidential tongues have taken bad slips when it comes to declaring a person’s guilt or innocence. This can be quite problematic since the government’s prosecutorial arm – the U.S. Justice Department – serves under the president’s command. Legal experts, including Harvard’s Noah Feldman, say it is an impeachable “abuse of authority” for a president to accuse someone of committing a crime without evidence. It has happened not infrequently over the years. And, in every instance prior to January 20, 2016, the gaffe provoked an immediate dustup of criticism, usually followed by some sort of presidential mea culpa.

In 1970, President Nixon said Charles Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders.” Since Manson’s trial had just gotten underway, the president’s declaration of guilt caused considerable pandemonium. Nixon apologized and walked his premature verdict back. In 1980, President Carter accused former attorney general Ramsey Clark and nine other Americans of a crime for defying his order to stay out of Iran. Carter’s declaration of guilt triggered a huge political blow up. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe called his remarks “a terrible blunder.” In 1988, President Reagan stunned his staff when he declared that Oliver North was not guilty in the Iran-Contra scandal, days after a grand jury indicted North on 23 charges. In 1998, President Clinton drew heavy criticism for saying that he didn’t think there should be a plea bargain in the Unabomber case because the defendant, Theodore J. Kaczynski, “if he’s guilty, killed a lot of people deliberately.” In 2009, President Obama opened a week-long media frenzy when he said the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department acted “stupidly” in the arrest of a black Harvard professor who was trying to get into his own home. Obama also took flack for implying that the alleged architect of the September 11 terrorist attacks would be found guilty and executed, should he be tried in U.S. Courts.

Trump, of course, soars far above the separation of powers concept, moonlighting as a wannabe Judge Judy. He pronounces someone’s criminal guilt on a near daily basis. Using Twitter as his gavel, the Donald dispenses his verdicts with terms like: “guilty as hell”, “totally illegal” and “so illegal”. The president has dispersed imaginary convictions for Hillary Clinton, her former campaign manager, John Podesta and his brother Tony; Obama and his former national security advisor, Susan Rice, and his former attorney general, Loretta Lynch; and recently fired FBI director James Comey. Just this morning, he accused his own attorney general and the acting FBI director of ignoring Hillary Clinton’s unspecified and unproven “crimes”. Unlike his predecessors, Trump has managed to issue these totally bogus claims of criminality against his political opponents with total impunity. In fact, they have become a staple of his presidency, akin to an innocuous proclamation for, say, National Condiment Appreciation Week.

Aside from a couple of obscure blogs, like the one you’re reading, there has been no public clamor about Trump bludgeoning his opponents with presidential criminal convictions. Yet, a single similar transgression by previous presidents kept the chattering class in a constant scold for days. This is just one of many ways in which this president has been held to a far lower standard than those who preceded him. There is an abundance of deficiencies that would invite rapt attention to any other president, but where Trump gets a pass. Like his speeches with the prosaic quality of a telephone book, his five-word sentence fragments that are utterly without meaning, his inability to know just what it is he doesn’t know, and his innate lack of intellectual curiosity.

Unfortunately, there is a lesson here for future presidents: If you want to deflect attention from your inherent inadequacies, be sure to collude with a foreign adversary, obstruct justice and tell lots of lies. Nobody will notice the other foibles.

MOTHER LODE OF VULGARITY WINS FEDERAL COURT REPRIEVE

Warning: If slang words entailing a hard “ck” sound invoke trauma, hysteria or bad middle school memories, please cover your eyes. For the rest of you, here’s the good news: “motherfucker” got a thumbs-up from three federal appellate judges. The decision may not rise quite to the level of Brown v. Board of Education, but it was music to ears of disgruntled employees, particularly those who have a m’fer for a boss.

What a long, strange judicial trip it’s been for this nasty moniker, the titular pinnacle of George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. According to those who study these things, motherfucker made its jurisprudence debut in a 1889 Texas Court of Appeals case, Levy v. State. A witness testified that Defendant Levy was a “God damned mother-f–king bastardly son-of-a-bitch.” The legal precedent established an expletive hierarchy, allowing every word except m’fer to be spelled out. A decade later, however, the same Texas court reversed itself and filled in the blanks. The case at hand involved a murder defendant who argued justifiable homicide on the basis that his victim had called him a “mother-fucking-son-of-a-bitch.” Twenty years after that, according to a book by historian Henry Louis Gates, a young man ordered to fight in World War I, fired off a letter to the editor of a Memphis newspaper calling his draft board “low-down motherfuckers”. He was court-martialed and did 10 years of hard labor.

Thanks to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, motherfucker has come a long way, etymologically speaking. Here’s the deal: Back in 2011, workers at a New York catering company, Pier Sixty, were trying to form a union. Shortly before the vote, one of the organizers, Hernan Perez, was berated by his boss, Bob McSweeney. On his break, Perez, smartphone in hand, punched out a Facebook vent about the encounter. Here, unedited, is what he posted: “Bob is such a NASTY MOTHER FUCKER don’t know how to talk to people!!!!!! Fuck his mother and entire fucking family!!!!! What a LOSER!!!!! Vote YES for the UNION!!!!!”

As you might imagine, Pier Sixty management did not shower Perez’s Facebook page with likes. Instead, it fired him. Therein began an intense six-year search for the true meaning of motherfucker by some of the best legal minds in the country. Under federal labor law, bosses are generally prohibited from disciplining workers who are acting together for the betterment of working conditions. In this case, Perez didn’t just call McSweeney a “nasty motherfucker,” he called him that in the context of a union organizing campaign. In labor law parlance, that is called “protected concerted activity.” In other words, you can’t be fired for that.

But wait, there’s more. There are limits to this protection. What if Perez had no Facebook access during that catering event and, instead of calling McSweeney a motherfucker, had, say, dumped a three-bean salad on his boss’ head? Under labor case law, an employee loses protection if the concerted activity is “opprobrious”. (In the interest of saving you a click, that means pretty darn bad.) So, exactly one century after some poor guy got 10 years of hard labor for calling his draft board a bunch of m’fers, thanks to Facebook and an angry union organizer, the legal system was posed to answer a question many of us had never pondered: Is motherfucker opprobrious?

Imagine the scene in the mahogany confines of justice: ponderous thinkers in black robes, judges accustomed to complex sentences packed with words like collateral estoppel, subrogation, tortfeasor and habeas corpus, studiously examining a vocabulary they’ve hidden from their children. They pour through the case law, decades of testimony about angry employees calling their managers everything from “stupid fucking moron” to “egotistical fucker”, from a “fucking asshole” to a “fucking crook”, without crossing the opprobrious line. But now they were faced, in a very literal sense, with the mother of them all.

Lawyers for Pier Sixty, with straight faces included in their $650-an-hour rate, argued that Perez went well beyond the common pale of vulgarity when he pulled his supervisor’s poor, innocent mother into the mix. Yes, they stipulated, their client’s managers had, indeed, discovered new conjugations of the f-word on a daily basis. They admitted the bosses said the following to their charges: “Are you guys fucking stupid?”; “a fucking little Mexican,” and a “motherfucker who should eat shit.” But, but, but, they insisted: the vile, disgusting words Perez used are “distinguishable from a passing epithet uttered in frustration”. When he said, “Fuck his mother and his entire family,” the corporate lawyers insisted, this worker was getting personal and involving his boss’ family members. And that, they said, is as opprobrious as it gets.

That argument was respectfully rejected, first by an administrative law judge, followed by the National Labor Relations Board, and then by the Second Circuit appellate panel. They concluded that Perez was not literally proposing sexual intercourse with his supervisor’s mother or other family members; he was simply dissing the guy himself. Any teenager could have explained that to the learned judges. But these kind of weighty matters need expert opinion, so they plowed through numerous academic treatises (here and here) on the use of mother-denigrating slang as a means of verbally attacking an adversary.

As a result of all this litigation. Perez won his job back. M’fer means many things to many people, but whatever it is, thanks to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, it is not opprobrious. Let’s hope this case does not end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Who knows what those motherfuckers would do with it?

AND NOW THE LATEST IN SPORTS: TWEETS THAT ROAR

Sports in general, and motorsport racing in particular, have never occupied much of my cranial real estate. Yet, I spent a good hunk of Memorial Day weekend thinking about both. It all started when Denver Post sports columnist Terry Frei fired off a thoughtless tweet saying he was “very uncomfortable” with a Japanese driver, Takuma Sato, winning the Indy 500.

As the Twittersphere erupted, complete with Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima references, Frei launched what has become the normal protocol for this kind of social media foot-in-mouth disorder: a series of inelegant apologies, one of which included a plug for his latest book. Then, as this formulaic minuet played out, front office honchos from the Denver Post went into full somber-and-righteous mode to declare the offending tweet “disrespectful and unacceptable”. “(It) doesn’t represent what we believe nor what we stand for,” so sayeth the corporate executives in a prepared statement. They also fired Frei, a move that is not always part of this post tweet-gone-bad ritual.

So, besides the fact that Sato can drive really fast, what do we know so far? Number 1: Frei’s tweet was an outrageous thought that should never have left his brain, outside the confidentiality of a therapist’s office. Number 2: the Denver Post’s reaction was the epitome of disingenuousness. The newspaper is owned by a hedge fund that “stands” for only one thing: sucking as much money as it can out of its properties. This company has financially benefited from Frei’s verbal edginess as a four-time winner of the Colorado sportswriter of the year award. If the Indy 500 tweet was linked to his role as a Post columnist, then his editors had every right, if not an obligation, to see it before it went out, just as they read and edited his columns prior to publication. In practice, however, most newspapers encourage or require their writers to tweet and use other social media platforms as a way of plugging the brand and drawing eyeballs to their content. The owners waive their right of advance approval to take full advantage of the spontaneity that is social media. To encourage controversial writing that attracts readers makes sense. Firing the guy when his controversy crosses a line that was never drawn for him does not.

But there is something bigger going on here, namely an epidemic of sportswriters stumbling into the Twitter penalty box. A former football writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer incurred the wrath of his employer when he tweeted that the owner of the Browns is a “pathetic figure”. An ESPN sportscaster was disciplined for a tweet that described his competitors at a Boston television station as “2 washed-up athletes and a 60-yr-old fat guy with no neck.” An Associated Press sportswriter who tweeted about horrible refereeing in an NBA game got into trouble with his employer after the referee filed a law suit. A Chicago Sun Times sports reporter had to delete his Twitter account after his lifetime collection of sexist tweets went viral. A New York Post sportswriter was fired for an inauguration day tweet that said simply: “9.11.2001. 1.20.2017”, apparently an assertion that the Trump presidency was as much a threat to this country as the Twin Towers and Pentagon bombings.

Before social media, sports reporters rarely encountered disciplinary action. As a union rep in this industry, the only sports discipline case I had was a hockey writer who, while at work, bet (and lost) $500 on whether the groundhog would see its shadow on February 2. (The poor chump swore he thought the no-gambling rule was limited to games he covered.) For the most part, sportswriters were in their own little world, far below management’s radar. The other huge difference between then and now is that many sports journalists of old distinguished themselves as top notch writers. Not limited to whatever unfinished and unvarnished thought might be floating in their heads, these literary giants were able to convert a mundane soccer match into compelling prose. I had never read a sports story before taking my first journalism class. I turned in a tepid, mechanical account of a student government meeting and my professor handed me a volume of selected sports articles. I told him I had no interest in sports. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “These are master story tellers. A good story is more than a recitation of facts.” For example:

• Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times) covering a 1960s Rose Bowl game involving an Iowa team: “There were thousands of people in calico and John Deer caps in their Winnebagos with their pacemakers and potato salad, looking for Bob Hope.”
• Shirley Povich (Washington Post) reporting on a New York Yankees pitcher tossing a perfect game in the 1956 World Series: “The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larson today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.”
• Red Smith (New York Times) describing an unlikely home run that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Yes, those were the days, my friends. It was a calmer time, before Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, a time when journalists faced only two tasks: getting it right and writing it well. In our brave, new, real time world, they are now expected to let loose with every embryotic half-baked thought that enters their heads. And pray that it doesn’t offend the suits who sign their paychecks. That leaves them with only one recourse, and I hope they take it: THINK – long and hard – before you tweet!