Vulgarity at the State Fair

On Saturday, I took the children to the “state fair” in Arcadia. 

Reader, it was not the California State Fair, which is a fine old tradition in Sacramento, the state capital.  It was nowhere near even a real county fair, of which I have been to dozens, and which require livestock displays and canning contests.  (My favorite was one I went to as a child up in rural Tehama County, in the far north of the state. They had a compelling and memorable demonstration of new tools for castrating bulls.) 

The Arcadia event was a simple, if pricey, carnival – lots of games and rides, concerts by ABBA and Journey cover bands, a beer tent, motorcycle stunts, dogs doing tricks, fried Snickers bars.  It was expensive and vulgar and absolutely delightful to my children, which means the hit on both wallet and waistline was worth it.

Vulgar.  In my family, few words of condemnation were harsher.  It comes from the Latin vulgus, meaning “common people.” (The original translation of the Bible into Latin is called the Vulgate for this reason – it was supposed to be accessible to the ordinary and the lightly educated.)  I can remember as a small boy, hearing my mother and hers describe something as “vulgar,” and without knowing what they meant, got the clear impression it was something to avoid.

As I mention in every other newsletter, I grew up on folk and country music.  I have always loved songs about outlaws, and few are more iconic – or more influential to me – than Woody Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd.  The outlaw has an origin tale.  As Guthrie (and later, Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Rosanne Cash and everyone else) sang, it all began thus:

If you'll gather 'round me, children,
A story I will tell
'Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw,
Oklahoma knew him well.

It was in the town of Shawnee,
A Saturday afternoon,
His wife beside him in his wagon
As into town they rode

There a deputy sheriff approached him
In a manner rather rude, using
Vulgar words of language,
An' his wife she overheard.

Pretty Boy grabbed a log chain,
And the deputy grabbed his gun;
In the fight that followed
He laid that deputy down.

(Guthrie didn’t always sing the same song the same way twice; some versions have it as “vulgar words of anger,” but the adjective is always the same.  And in the WASP culture in which I was raised, “vulgar words of anger” would have been almost a tautology; public expressions of rage were automatically unacceptable.)

Many outlaw origin stories start with an offense against a woman.  Sometimes, a wife or daughter is raped or killed and that launches our hero on his crusade (think “Braveheart” or “Gladiator,” or poor old Lucretia). For Woody and Pretty Boy, all it took to launch a legend was rudeness and vulgarity in the presence of a woman.  I queried my mother once about the song, and she conceded that Floyd may have overreacted slightly to a legitimate outrage. I took the point – vulgarity was a serious breach of the social order.

On a Saturday afternoon just like that one in Shawnee long ago, the children and I waited in line for a roller coaster. Three young men joined the queue behind us, and every other word that spilled from their lips was profane. Fuck that shit! I fucked up that motherfucker, you know?

And so it went.

We are not Pretty Boy; we do not police the language of others.  I was touched and impressed, however, that my nine-year-old son gently maneuvered his older sister forward, attempting as best he could to put his body between her and the rude boys.  Heloise noticed too, and grabbed his right hand in an affectionate squeeze.

Afterwards, over horchata and gyros, I asked David what he was thinking.  “I wanted to protect Nena,” he replied; “I didn’t want her to hear that.”

“I didn’t need protecting,” Heloise replied, “But I love that you tried.”

I was 12, several years older than I had been when I first contemplated the meaning of Pretty Boy Floyd, when my grandmother took me to see Kramer vs. Kramer.  There was some mild profanity, and a brief scene of partial nudity. Debriefing with my mother that night, I told her that I was very worried about how grandmother might have felt.  Mama smiled.  “Your grandmother has heard and seen all those things.  I love that you were worried, but just because we don’t use certain words or behave in a certain way, it doesn’t mean we’re frightened of people who do.”

When I first started teaching, I read William Perry’s classic on the stages of intellectual and ethical development.  Perry argued that we pass through four stages: childlike Dualism (black and white thinking); early adolescent Multiplicity (everything is grey, there is no truth); Relativism (different things can be true for different people), and lastly, Commitment within Relativism (I have found a moral and intellectual code that works for me, and I will live by it, even as I acknowledge it is not universal).

I am raising my children, as best I can, towards commitment within relativism.  Our family does not use “vulgar words of language,” just as we do not speak in tongues on Sundays.  As I tell my children, your ancestors found a path that works for them, and it may or may not work for you. 

When you were little, I say to them, you thought our way was the only right way; as you grow, you may think that everything your parents do is wrong.  Later, perhaps, you will be able to make your own commitments, keeping some of what was given to you and discarding other aspects.  A distaste for vulgarity is a distillation of commitment within relativism: your parents and grandparents do not speak this way, or conduct ourselves this way, but we do not believe our way is the only way. 

We can and will go out into the world and hear “vulgar things,” and we can do so without judging or condemning other people’s vernacular.  That David heard the bad language, tried to protect his sister from it without confronting the profane boys -- and that she then acknowledged both the generosity, and the ultimate fruitlessness of the gesture? 

This is a good way to be in the world.