Dan's Papers - August 3, 2007 -

My daughter and my two grandchildren, age 6 and 3, have been visiting us here in East Hampton this past week. The other morning, we all piled in my car, I turned the key in the ignition and on came the radio, satellite radio, tuned to the last station I had been listening to, which was an x-rated standup comedy station. The third word that came out of the speakers was the F word. Satellite Radio is, at the present time, free to use any words they want to, unlike regular radio, TV and the movies.

"Best to turn that off," my daughter said. I complied immediately, of course.

It is quite amazing that, during the last ten years, all of our government agencies, with the full concurrence of the citizenry and the Film and Television Board, have been on a campaign to stamp out every utterance of any obscene language in the media.

The reason I think it is amazing is because I was among those who, forty years ago, fought so hard to liberate foul language from the restrictions put on it just one generation before.

Allowing people to say the F-word and the S-word and all the other words, we argued, is protected by the American constitution as part of our country's promises of freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression to its citizens. It seemed so right at the time. And I guess it was.

I wonder, today, as we clamp down once again on dirty words, where are all those millions of people, those hippies and liberals and constitutional lawyers and politicians and freedom marchers, today? Why aren't they speaking up? Okay, they are a bit older, but they still have, um, freedom of speech. I guess. What's the matter? Cat got your tongues?

Frankly, I have changed too. Forty years ago, when I heard a dirty word, a thrill of triumph went through me. The prior generation lived in the 1940s and 1950s. Nobody ever said a dirty word. In the movies, married people even slept in separate beds. It was a rule of the Film Board. You couldn't show anybody in the same bed. People would kiss, the music would swell up and there would be a fade out.

We thought it was terrible it ended at that. Lenny Bruce, on a stage in a New York club, said a dirty word and the Feds arrested him and threw him in jail. Everybody ran out into the streets in protest.

Then, Clark Gable said, "I don't give a damn" in the movie Gone With the Wind and everybody went nuts. Pretty soon, films were filled with people speaking dirty words. Books were written with dirty words. And it felt so GOOD. You'd lean out your window and at the top of your voice shout out one of them. And out on the street, if anybody heard it, they'd shout back "right on," which was one of the common phrases in those days.

I always thought, back then, that these dirty words had a richness to them, providing meanings and nuances to thoughts that could not be expressed in the English language any other way.

But now, with the crackdown, the richness and nuances just seem embarrassing. Try it. Particulary if you were one of those who fought so hard to make these words legal. Just try it right now. I'll wait. See?

What the heck has happened?

Among the many casualties of this swing of the pendulum back to where it was half a century ago are movies made in the 1970s and 1980s. Some were just big, dumb car chase movies starring Burt Reynolds and overweight police officers, but others were simply magnificent. But they don't appear on TV today, or if they do, they are full of bleeps. So they are essentially gone, all gone. All that effort, right down in the wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap dumpster.

The latest news about the battle against bad words has come in a Federal Appeals Court, where there has been a trial concerning what is called by the participants "fleeting expletives." These are sudden bad words said on live TV shows sort of by surprise, which are impossible to bleep out because they happen so fast.

For example, Nicole Richie, getting an award on the Billboard Music Awards said such a word, apparently using it instead of the more old fashioned and ok word "shucks." On the same show, the movie star Cher said the S word. Both were used by the prosecution in this case -- the TV stations broadcasting these programs were protesting fines charged to them by the Film Board because that's what the Film Board wanted to censor.

The prosecution argued that "fleeting expletives" used by movie stars were no different than "fleeting expletives' used by certain politicians on C-Span. They gave the example of President Bush using the F word at a luncheon honoring Tony Blair that was on TV without anyone being fined. They gave another example of Vice President Cheney issuing such a forbidden phrase when speaking in the Senate in rebuttal to something that Senator Patrick Leahy had said. In the courtroom, the Vice President made a comment that was an obscene version of the phrase "get lost," which everybody knows, after they think about it, must have been "go take a flying f---."

The prosecution also argued that "fleeting expletives" were comments of frustration and anger different from other expletives that refer to "sexual or excretory organs and their activities," which they reluctantly conceded, apparently, are, these days, inappropriate.

Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan came up during this trial. It was argued by the prosecution that the frequent use of "fleeting expletives" throughout the movie, allowed by the Film Board's panel because they were historically accurate, understandable under the circumstances and an insult to our brave military veterans if not used, were thus a further example of the capricious nature of the Film Board's rules.

In the end, the court agreed with the prosecution. So, the Film Board's rules were thrown out, or at least will be thrown out if this decision survives an appeal to the Supreme Court.

I sometimes think that the tightening up on the use of obscenity has something to do with our being at war. The long-ago clamping down on bad words occurred during World War II. Now, we are clamping down again in what appears to be a war against religious extremists. You could also argue that a clampdown occurred during World War I, because the Roaring Twenties followed with all its liberalism. We tighten up and focus our thinking when we are at war.

I want to end this article by letting you know that somewhere in our archives here at Dan's Papers, in the 1970s, there are issues of the paper that have ads for x-rated movies that were playing at the main movie theatres in Westhampton, Southampton and East Hampton. Go see Debbie Does Dallas. Go see Behind the Green Door. And we did. And at the time, it was the thing to do. Today, it would be ghastly. People would protest in the streets.