Public Obscenity
Can any good come from public obscenity, swearing or ‘four letter words’?
Can any harm?
I suggest that the decriminalizing of this (as social s.o.p. despite laws against it)
starts a trickledown effect of INCIVILITY and all things which lead to
INHUMANITY. Without manners and courtesy we’re lost. The ball rolls down.
Just as they’re finding in NYC that if they’re tough on B&E’s that murder
DISAPPEARS, I suspect that one step our anti-culture could take toward
becoming a culture once again would be to institude awareness again of
the survival need for politeness in all its respects.
I’m considering the deletion of ‘profanity’ from my zine!
Sure, it might limit the voices I publish, but what good are they anyway?
What harm? (I dunno, it seems crazy….what would I do without my last
Hitchhiker Jen Gogglebox reprint? Do you just “X” out those words? Maybe
that has its own ARTISTIC effect?)
Profanity segregates. What’s a cool buzzword in one place, is alienating in another.
You can have a brilliant, progressive, radical movie that the whole family can watch and you
can have a supposedly ‘family’ movie that really no family could watch together. Profanity
segregates internally as well. It’s unrealistic in terms of portraying anything but cliques.
If you have a movie that’s heavy on the sex-talk, guess who will be missing from the scenes in
that movie? —Children! There’s secrecy and in-crowd qualities to profanity. It’s indulgent, it’s
personal, so you do it amongst your pals, not in public.
I will not tolerate the idea anymore that ‘music makes no difference’
that ‘books make no difference’. All things fit together and have responsibility.
They all make a huge difference, both as causes and symptoms.
The legal defense of porn, etc., that ‘it has no effect…it’s JUST a book’
is wrong and a sign of our insane anticulture. What EACH of us does
EFFECTS. But far more importantly, we must fight against this legalistic Big Lie by
realizing that our whole culture is based on just a few BOOKS. And it’s inspired by
just a few SONGS and types of music. Literature is the Queen Art; it’s how a culture
can know itself and its options. As lit changes, so changes the culture. A sterile one can
even be reborn when its hero writer escapes his bonds. So with that in mind….
Why did profanity come to be allowed and have public impact?
Due to pressure by the ACLU, I suppose, the same one which turned
us into a litigation-nation. Perversion of intellectualism…the
same force which took ‘drugs for consciousness-raising’ to ‘drugs are
harmless’ to ‘drugs destroy planet’. …A Good Thing in one setting is
allowed to be legally a Good in all settings…no holds barred. But freedom
does not equal libertinism…libertinism enslaves, destroys.
Specifically: swearing is part of a REACTION against hypocracy.
A veneer of sweetness is seen to hide a rotten core, so the old pose is
killed and it feels good. However, reactions are never free from the
original sin; they’re equal to it, just opposite, no less rotten. The cure
is to stop being rotten, not to stop speaking politely.
Read 70’s novels where sex and swearing were first really unleashed
in popular culture…they seem pandering and trite now. Like kids playing
for the easy shot, trying out training wheels. The low blows don’t ADD
to the work either usually. They weaken and embarrass. Why?
Reactions *date* one, bind, limit. I suspect that if I can free my zine from
reaction, then it will be more universal, that no one will have an excuse.
This is where ART comes in. Reaction is always(?) a BEGINNER phase
because it’s IMITATIVE. But it really should be kept PRIVATE (many
things only have meaning in PRIVATE…the postmod idea of equivalence
is insane) until one grows up.
I think I might be proud if OYB could be a zine that any child could read
without being incorrectly corroded. However, maybe that’s a silly idea.
Things are hidden until the right time, even if they’re out in the open
(which they always are). So OYB will probably always be an Adult Zine.
Meaning that it helps push humans past the Teen Phase and on down the
road. Or maybe anyone stand to use that push? I dunno what kids need.
But I think that Plato is right that they must not be disillusioned until
their base is solid.
