What Exactly Is Civil Fucking Discourse?

It's interesting. During the campaign, the right was up in arms about Whoopi Goldberg making the cheap and obvious joke based on the name and colloquial bodily reference connected to the word "Bush." Yet, we've just had a second major governmental figure drop the proverbial f-bomb with significantly less fanfare.

The first, of course, was VP Dick Cheney telling Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to "Go fuck yourself"on the floor of the United States Senate. (Recall that in the hard hitting interview with Fox News, Cheney did not apologize, but say that he felt much better afterwards. After the recent hunting incident with the VP, Leahy was quoted as saying that he feels much better himself about the run-in on the Senate floor because apparently he got off easy.)

But if the people's hall is not a sacred enough place for you, last week, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scala did him one better. Responding to a Boston Herald reporter's question about possible appearances of impartiality, Scalia repsonded,

"To my critics, I say, 'Vaffanculo,'" punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said.The Italian phrase means '(expletive) you.'"

This was on Sunday in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross! There is a photo of the Justice in mid-gesture over at No More Mr. Nice Blog with a nice discussion of it.

We hear often about the need to bring back civil discourse. Does profanity have a place in civil discourse? Seems like profanity can be used as a rhetorical tool, as a means to accent something. Yet, the utterance of the syllables is taken as a problematic act in itself. It is their use, not their meaning that seems important. Usually, if I say "the guy over there has herpes" and John is the only guy over there, then I have said that John has a venereral disease. The indexical phrase "the guy over there" and "John" mean the same thing. I can't get out of it by saying, "I didn't say 'John,' I said 'the guy over there'." But if I hit my hand with a hammer and say "fudge!" it is seen as different from saying "fuck" even though everyone knows that fudge is just a stand in for fuck. It seems to point to the original term just as much as "the guy over there" points to John. Yet, the same relation doesn't hold. The same goes for shoot and sugar, darn and dang, frickin and flippin, and a bunch more.

But there is a further and seemingly more important difference between the Whoopie and the Cheney/Scalia cases. True, Whoopi was doing a night club act and trying to get laughs, but the nightclub act was at a campaign sponsored fund-raiser for John Kerry's embarrassing presidential campaign. It was part of a national dialogue about the direction of the country. Perhaps not the most insightful contribution to that dialogue, but part nonetheless. The Cheney and Scalia invocations of naughty words were also part of a national dialogue, but they seem intended to play a very different role. The speaker's intention of the utterances clearly seems designed not to further the debate, but to end it. "Go fuck yourself" does not invite an engaged response. Think of the scene in Life of Brian where Brian tells the crowd to "piss off" and they then ask "How shall we piss off, O Lord?"; the humor comes from the fact that "piss off" is used as a conversation ender. It means I am no longer part of this discussion. That is what Cheney and Scalia clearly seemed to intend. their profanity was designed to stop dialogue, not participate in it.

So does the intent of a curse word make a difference in the acceptability of its use or are the words simply cultural no-no's, period? Is there a place for swearing in civil discourse? Are they just arcane, obsolete leftovers from the tight-assed old days that we have liberated ourselves from or is there something really wrong with using those words? Should we really...aw, fuck it.