Latest / Brian Thomas / F...ing Profanity - Big Picture with Jack Atherton
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Radio.
- 0:18Speaker 2: Just shy of seven h six here Pittybob Karsiti talk
- 0:20Speaker 2: station Wednesday, and thank god we are back to normal
- 0:24Speaker 2: for all those listeners reached out to me, He says,
- 0:25Speaker 2: Where in the heck is Jack Adanan Ben? We miss him?
- 0:28Speaker 2: Welcome back. It's time for the big picture, the return
- 0:30Speaker 2: of jack Athan and Jack. I share their the sense
- 0:33Speaker 2: of loss not having on the program last couple of weeks.
- 0:35Speaker 2: It's good to have you back on, man.
- 0:37Speaker 1: Thanks so much for having me back. Pal. Even with
- 0:40Speaker 1: things this week you finally lose your FCC license to
- 0:46Speaker 1: talk about cover up the kid's ears, We're gonna talk
- 0:50Speaker 1: about effing profanity. Over the years, we've already discussed movies, music, art,
- 0:58Speaker 1: even fashion, all to show that the things we most
- 1:02Speaker 1: despise about Marxist politics bubble up from Marxist pop culture. Now,
- 1:08Speaker 1: I know these may be the least popular segments we do, Brian,
- 1:12Speaker 1: because it's not just Marxists. Most conservatives today also cherish
- 1:17Speaker 1: the pop culture they grew up with, because often it's
- 1:20Speaker 1: all they know. Old fogies in every age claim in
- 1:25Speaker 1: my day everything was better, get off my lawn. Yet
- 1:29Speaker 1: without a shared cultural tradition to build upon culture tends
- 1:34Speaker 1: to degenerate, and as Andrew Breitbart always said, politics is
- 1:39Speaker 1: downstream of culture. We may fixate on winning the next election.
- 1:44Speaker 1: Once in a while. We may even try doing that
- 1:47Speaker 1: by advocating our founder's belief in America, the American idea
- 1:52Speaker 1: of God given individual rights, including free markets protected by
- 1:58Speaker 1: limited d central lines government. But do we explain that
- 2:03Speaker 1: big idea Brian as persuasively as our founders did. No.
- 2:08Speaker 1: So this week let's talk about the way we talk
- 2:11Speaker 1: and if some people object, if you, well, that's my point.
- 2:16Speaker 1: A Cole Porter's song notes good authors to who once
- 2:20Speaker 1: knew better words, now only use four letter words writing prose.
- 2:26Speaker 1: Anything Goes. That was ninety years ago, my friend. Not
- 2:30Speaker 1: long after Anything Goes debuted on Broadway, the most famous
- 2:34Speaker 1: line from Gone with the Wind almost had to be
- 2:37Speaker 1: cut because Hollywood's own sensors banned the word damn. Luckily,
- 2:43Speaker 1: they made exceptions for lines from recognized literary works, so
- 2:48Speaker 1: after some wrangling, Clark Cable did not have to say, Frankly,
- 2:52Speaker 1: my dear, I don't give a darn. But fast forward
- 2:56Speaker 1: to a TV series. I love that we've discussed Brian
- 2:59Speaker 1: because it's about the only place you can hear a
- 3:01Speaker 1: defense of fossil fuels. Landmen realistic about our need for
- 3:06Speaker 1: oil and natural gas. Yet Landmen also achieves present day
- 3:12Speaker 1: realism by making every other word of dialogue n F bomb.
- 3:18Speaker 1: When did we replace better words with four letter words?
- 3:21Speaker 1: And what does that tell us about popular culture and politics? Actually,
- 3:26Speaker 1: four letter words have been around an awfully long time.
- 3:29Speaker 1: From Roman comedy to Shakespeare. Plays that appealed to popular
- 3:33Speaker 1: tastes featured sex, violence, and cussing, until as audiences became
- 3:39Speaker 1: more refined. Even Priggish, a nineteenth century brother and sister
- 3:44Speaker 1: by the name of Bowdler, came out with a sanitized
- 3:48Speaker 1: family Shakespeare. It didn't last that long ever. Since then, though,
- 3:52Speaker 1: the term boblerized means to clean up a vulgar text. However,
- 3:57Speaker 1: Victorian ideas about decency backfire. In search of realism and
- 4:02Speaker 1: social justice, Charles Dickens rightly portrayed thieves and prostitutes. The
- 4:07Speaker 1: revolt against gentility soon spread to all the arts at
- 4:12Speaker 1: the turn of the twentieth century. For example, Picasso's most
- 4:15Speaker 1: famous early painting also portrayed prostitutes. Using the new Cubist technique,
- 4:22Speaker 1: He and George Brock invented to show that you had
- 4:25Speaker 1: to look at reality from different angles to arrive at
- 4:28Speaker 1: the truth. Fair enough, it's a good point. But just
- 4:31Speaker 1: a few years later, modern artists ditched the tradition, going
- 4:36Speaker 1: back to Michelangelo and all the way through Picasso, that
- 4:39Speaker 1: celebrated humanity, and they instead opted for absurdity for nonsense.
- 4:46Speaker 1: We've talked previously about the painter named Malevich. He put
- 4:50Speaker 1: a white square on a white canvas and called it
- 4:53Speaker 1: white on white. We've talked about Marcel Duchamp hanging a
- 4:57Speaker 1: urinol in an art gallery and calling in where do
- 5:01Speaker 1: you go from there? Toilet bowls will take music. Mozart
- 5:06Speaker 1: and Schubert led directly to what used to be called
- 5:09Speaker 1: the Great American Songbook Cole Porter, Gershwin, Duke Ellington. There
- 5:14Speaker 1: was plenty of room, Brian in the songbook for early rock,
- 5:18Speaker 1: the product of Field Hollers, Blues and teenage rebellion. But folks,
- 5:23Speaker 1: am I alone in thinking a lot of today's rock
- 5:26Speaker 1: at rap has devolved into a mind numbing rhythm and
- 5:31Speaker 1: shouting that spews obscenities. The risk with any art form
- 5:36Speaker 1: that reduces ourselves, that aims to throw out every rule
- 5:41Speaker 1: is that soon. It's not universal, it's just reduced to
- 5:46Speaker 1: the lowest common denominator. Now in politics, one low point
- 5:51Speaker 1: has to be Democrats recently actually coaching their candidates to
- 5:56Speaker 1: drop more F bombs than President Trump has dropped. On
- 5:59Speaker 1: the eye. Its when you can't think of anything else
- 6:03Speaker 1: to say. When you can't think, just scream F you,
- 6:08Speaker 1: or if your tongue tied, stick out a middle finger.
- 6:11Speaker 1: Better words help us think more clearly. Profanity reduces us
- 6:16Speaker 1: to something subhuman and un American. The best examples of
- 6:21Speaker 1: profound eloquence I can think of are America's founding documents
- 6:25Speaker 1: and our greatest speeches, read aloud with your kids or grandkids,
- 6:30Speaker 1: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, then Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and John F.
- 6:35Speaker 1: Kennedy's inaugural address. Everybody remembers his most famous line, ask
- 6:41Speaker 1: not what your country can do for you, ask what
- 6:44Speaker 1: you can do for your country. President Kennedy was an
- 6:48Speaker 1: old time Democrat. Today that's pure maga, along with JFK's
- 6:53Speaker 1: across the board tax cuts and peace through strength, defense spending,
- 6:58Speaker 1: and remember as well Kennedy's other line, now the trumpet summons.
- 7:02Speaker 1: Summons us again, not as a call to bear arms,
- 7:05Speaker 1: though arms we need. Not as a call to battle,
- 7:08Speaker 1: though and battled we are, but a call to bear
- 7:12Speaker 1: the burden of a long twilight struggle against tyranny, poverty, disease,
- 7:19Speaker 1: and war itself. End quote. What didn't you hear, friends?
- 7:24Speaker 1: Not one single f bomb in some I say, clean
- 7:29Speaker 1: up our speech and will help clean up our country?
- 7:32Speaker 1: What do you say? And please keep it clean?
- 7:35Speaker 2: Brother? I agree with you all having day long there?
- 7:38Speaker 2: Jack added, And it's not seriously, I you know, listening
- 7:42Speaker 2: to you and just sort of thinking about where we
- 7:43Speaker 2: are and sort of maybe this this this infusion of
- 7:46Speaker 2: Marx SoC ieteology, which in I never thought I would
- 7:48Speaker 2: see in my lifetime being embraced by so many people.
- 7:51Speaker 2: It's it seems to me, in thinking about art and
- 7:54Speaker 2: the clothing, that you would talk about fashion issues over
- 7:57Speaker 2: the cover several conscious conversations. Whatever is going on that
- 8:02Speaker 2: is perceived to be the norm, the status quo, what
- 8:06Speaker 2: is generally accepted, what is the shared cultural condition at
- 8:10Speaker 2: any given moment in history, people somehow or other feel
- 8:15Speaker 2: the need to rebel against it for whatever reason. You know,
- 8:19Speaker 2: it's it's You'll see that in the art community all
- 8:21Speaker 2: the time, and it's like, there's no accepted just we're done.
- 8:25Speaker 2: We're gonna stick with this as a form. It's like, no,
- 8:28Speaker 2: there's gotta be something different out there, and I'm going
- 8:31Speaker 2: to go after it regardless of where it goes. Okay,
- 8:33Speaker 2: that's how you end up with an upside down crucifix
- 8:35Speaker 2: in a jar of urine and someone calling it art.
- 8:37Speaker 2: It offends, it's shocking, Oh my god, you know, and
- 8:41Speaker 2: people react that way, and then there's this media snowball
- 8:45Speaker 2: effect that goes on, did you see what that person did?
- 8:48Speaker 2: Oh my god? And then there's the outrage that ensues
- 8:51Speaker 2: from some people, and there's others that go out and
- 8:53Speaker 2: defend it, and people click on that and people write
- 8:55Speaker 2: about it. It's, you know, the building of celebrity or
- 8:59Speaker 2: being noticed. Because you have so far rebelled against whatever
- 9:03Speaker 2: is the cultural norm, it's going to get you noticed.
- 9:06Speaker 2: And that seems to me and that's what I've arrived
- 9:08Speaker 2: at with regard the use of the F bomb so
- 9:09Speaker 2: much more frequently now that the F bomb is becoming
- 9:12Speaker 2: a kind of a regularly used word in all forms
- 9:15Speaker 2: of conversation, It's like The Brits are about ten years
- 9:17Speaker 2: or more ahead of us on that one, because you
- 9:19Speaker 2: hear nothing but that all the time over there. At
- 9:21Speaker 2: least that was my experience. But that seems to be
- 9:25Speaker 2: it rebel just for the sake of rebellion, rebel just
- 9:28Speaker 2: because you want to be that person, You want to
- 9:29Speaker 2: get the attention for being the fly and the ointment.
- 9:32Speaker 2: I think there's something to be said about that.
- 9:35Speaker 1: Yeah, this culture of outrage and victimhood, when people are
- 9:40Speaker 1: not victims, they are the luckiest people in the world.
- 9:43Speaker 1: It brings us down and it makes us easier to
- 9:47Speaker 1: be led. You have mentioned the Democrats ludicrous coordinated attempts
- 9:52Speaker 1: to seem hip by cursing, though in fairness, for many
- 9:55Speaker 1: of them, rofanity is not appose. You remember when Barack
- 9:58Speaker 1: Obama signed Obama Vice President Joe Biden, not yet senile,
- 10:03Speaker 1: whispered into the President's ear and right into a microphone.
- 10:07Speaker 1: This is a big thefin deal. But to be completely fair,
- 10:12Speaker 1: President Trump's natural way of speaking in public bristles with profanity,
- 10:18Speaker 1: as when he calls some South American and African nations
- 10:21Speaker 1: excrement whole countries. I cleaned that up. Obscene insults paving
- 10:26Speaker 1: the way for Trump's joking threats to annex hostile places
- 10:31Speaker 1: from Canada to Greenland and illustrated horror moves. Mister Trump
- 10:35Speaker 1: used to say, if he wanted, he could be as
- 10:38Speaker 1: presidential as honest Abe Lincoln, who did not curse. Meantime,
- 10:43Speaker 1: he and all of us might try emulating another president,
- 10:47Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt. Speak softly and carry a big stick.
- 10:53Speaker 2: I like that one. And I did a quick search
- 10:56Speaker 2: knowing anticipation of your topic because I didn't know your
- 10:59Speaker 2: subject matter was effing profanity. Apparently, research shows that nearly
- 11:04Speaker 2: ninety percent of recorded US presidential profanity since nineteen nineteen
- 11:09Speaker 2: happened in the last decade. It's a downward, de evolutionary
- 11:14Speaker 2: spiral war on across all those subject matters, Jack Advan, it.
- 11:18Speaker 1: Is, and we can reverse it. But as with everything
- 11:20Speaker 1: you and I talk about, it has to start at home,
- 11:24Speaker 1: and it has to start with us.
- 11:26Speaker 2: Jack, what would have been the outcome with you growing up?
- 11:29Speaker 2: And if you to cursed in front of your mom
- 11:31Speaker 2: along these lines.
- 11:34Speaker 1: My mom is listening right now. She's one of your
- 11:37Speaker 1: most loyal listeners, and I guarantee you she is not
- 11:41Speaker 1: yelling at a profanity. She's yelling out. I didn't raise
- 11:44Speaker 1: my son that way.
- 11:45Speaker 2: That's right, And I could still hear my dad's voice
- 11:47Speaker 2: about that kind of thing. You know, man, you better
- 11:49Speaker 2: not use that of any kind of language in front
- 11:51Speaker 2: of your mom. It was always being respectful, and I
- 11:55Speaker 2: grew up in a war with yes, sir, no, sir, yes, ma'am. No. Man,
- 11:57Speaker 2: when's the last time you heard that from anybody? In fact,
- 11:59Speaker 2: every time might hear a young person say it, and
- 12:01Speaker 2: it's not very often. I just I do a double take, like,
- 12:05Speaker 2: oh my god.
- 12:07Speaker 1: You know, we talk about mom and that conjures up
- 12:10Speaker 1: in our minds and image of apple pie, an apple
- 12:13Speaker 1: cheeked woman. How many generations have gone by since the
- 12:17Speaker 1: time we began using profanity as water coming out of
- 12:22Speaker 1: a fountain?
- 12:24Speaker 2: Too many?
- 12:25Speaker 1: Just you know, if your mom spoke that way when
- 12:27Speaker 1: she was young, and her mom spoke that way when
- 12:30Speaker 1: she was young, chances are you're going to speak that
- 12:32Speaker 1: way too.
- 12:33Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh that's true. And you see that leads me
- 12:34Speaker 2: to the point we're just going to make exactly that point.
- 12:37Speaker 2: I heard a story. So it was a teacher who
- 12:39Speaker 2: I can't remember which school system, and I believe My
- 12:41Speaker 2: wife relaid this to me just the other day. Anybody
- 12:43Speaker 2: had a conversation with her. A child, a very young child,
- 12:47Speaker 2: element young elementary school age child cursed the teacher out,
- 12:52Speaker 2: and the teacher recoiled like I couldn't believe that this
- 12:54Speaker 2: young person was driving so many curse words. And when
- 12:58Speaker 2: the administration was asked about what to do about it,
- 13:01Speaker 2: the reaction was pretty much boiled down to will just
- 13:03Speaker 2: let it go? And I think that's to your point.
- 13:06Speaker 2: You can't punish the child because the child grew up
- 13:08Speaker 2: in a home where those words are used regularly in
- 13:11Speaker 2: all forms of conversation. How is the child to know
- 13:13Speaker 2: what's appropriate and inappropriate if they haven't been raised to
- 13:16Speaker 2: know what a curse word actually is, that there is
- 13:18Speaker 2: such a such a thing as an outlier word that
- 13:21Speaker 2: you're not supposed to use, or.
- 13:23Speaker 1: Even if the parents don't speak that way. The child
- 13:25Speaker 1: becomes exposed to popular culture, Ramesley and I, as you know, Tutor,
- 13:29Speaker 1: fourth graders they're angels. I mean, they're the same kind
- 13:32Speaker 1: of kids you would have seen one hundred years ago,
- 13:35Speaker 1: but then they step out into this world of pop culture.
- 13:39Speaker 2: Well, I would expect any parents who have the want
- 13:42Speaker 2: to serve their children's best interests and actually hire a
- 13:45Speaker 2: tutor or get them in front of a tutor. Probably
- 13:47Speaker 2: came from a pretty sound home anyway, where parents care
- 13:49Speaker 2: about and are concerned about the future of their children's education.
- 13:53Speaker 1: Now this is a local public school, Well, they're doing
- 13:56Speaker 1: the best they can. You know, nobody castigates the schools
- 13:59Speaker 1: more than I when it comes to things like using
- 14:01Speaker 1: Howard's in history books and all the rest. They do
- 14:04Speaker 1: what they can. But how do you escape the world?
- 14:09Speaker 2: Good point, jack Athanan always making great points here in
- 14:11Speaker 2: this particular segment, which you call the Big Picture with
- 14:13Speaker 2: Jack Avian and Jack. I look forward to next Wednesday
- 14:15Speaker 2: and doing it again. I hope you in your better half,
- 14:17Speaker 2: stay healthy and much love to both of you. Have
- 14:21Speaker 2: a great week, my friend,