This explains a lot about Kathleen Parker:
During my own childhood, even private cursing was rare, and the third finger was something only the crudest people used to express themselves. No one I knew ever dropped the F-bomb. The worst children heard was an occasional “hell” or “damn,” usually following an incident involving a badly aimed hammer.
I’m just guessing that her father wasn’t a longshoreman. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
We seem to have a lot of these center-right columnists who think everything should be nice and polite just like their childhood. Kathleen Parker was 17 in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, when Robert Kennedy was shot, when Mayor Daley beat the hippies down at the Democratic National Convention, and when 16,589 Americans died in Vietnam.
I guess she missed all that.
on all that free love stuff too.
Did she get the vapors when Darth Cheney told Senator Leahy to go .. well .. you know?
‘Go darn yourself,’ you mean? Cheney is a gentleman.
Guess what? I was 17 in 1968 too. And that Parker quote perfectly describes the world I lived in. I never heard and never used “curse” words, even hell or damn. I’m very much a democrat, but that was my upbringing too. In fact, I don’t think anyone ever heard a curse word out of my mouth until a summer day in ~1970 when I was working on a pasture fence, a wasp flew down the back of my shirt and stung the crap out of me. People a long distance away were stunned to hear me scream Fuck! It is not clear to me that language is improved by the regular use of curse words, that are best served rare.
My world too, I was mid 20’s in 68 and I had never spoken the F word….it was used around me occasionally but not often, it was considered a very coarse word at best. Hell and damn were used by my parents generation from early memory, .
Things were soon to change though in the next few years, hippies, war and feminists brought their changes which allowed us the freedom to swear to our hearts content.
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Hi Diane! All the cussing @Booman must have reached the West Coast. Good to hear from you though! I hope all is well with family, friends and (grand)kids. For good times’ sake lots of ((((hugs)))).
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Yes Oui, lol, All is well with family, new little baby girl Ruby has entered bringing us more joy.
I’m writing a book, for 7 months now, maybe half done, so that’s been keeping me busy.
Hope all is well with your family….hugs to you too.
I was 19 when I joined the Marines. After coming home on leave from bootcamp, my mother remarked that the Corps was really good for me. My language had improved significantly.
I think her exact words were:
“you sure as shit don’t fuckin’ curse as much you damn well used to do ‘ya?”
So, Foul language was alive and well in my home, thank you very much.
exactly.
Our culture has opened up, but it hasn’t changed all that much since the middle-60’s. People had sex out of wedlock in the 1960’s. They cursed a blue streak in the 60’s. But that was airbrushed out of our television and newspapers. We had a thing called “polite society” back then, but it was either artificial or the enclave of the privileged. When people are burning things in the street and calling the police “pigs.” your political discourse isn’t more civil than today. It’s less.
Hi CG, yes we had sex out of wedlock but babies out of wedlock was still taboo. It took awhile for that to be accepted.
I wouldn’t call it exactly artificial, everybody (at lease the males) COULD cuss a blue streak, they just didn’t do it unless they were out with the boys. That was left for white trash.
White trash like LBJ.
Best President/Worst President of the 20th Century. There was not a moral test that man couldn’t fail.
Same here. I never heard my late father (WWII Army) or father-in-law (WWII Navy) use a curse word. (My Catholic father, when out of earshot of my Episcopalian mother, would occasionally use hell or damn, which he insisted were perfectly good Catholic words!) Some of us were brought up that way even though, of course, we heard it all the time from school buddies. I still don’t curse except for the misaimed hammer situation. Other people can’t seem to speak without cursing every other word. I’m not yearning for the “good old days”, although perhaps a return to the music of the late 1960s wouldn’t be bad! 🙂
You’d have to have been stone dead to have missed all that. It was so in your face that everyone sentient being had to look away in horror. Tea parties—and I mean real tea parties where the civil pour and chat and chat and pour rattling their saucers to the undercurrent of selfsatisfaction—were not the staple of 17 year olds, of which I was one. Kathleen Parker lives in such a tea party.
Parker echoes what you hear from “centrist independents” all the time. Basically a paean to a fantasy place in time where civility, community, and respect ruled the culture. What’s important about the fantasy is what it forgets: murderous and semi-legal racism, McCarthyist destruction of anyone who dared utter thoughts that strayed out of the narrow Americanist line, the “Cold War”, incredible corruption in business and government running the country behind that “civil” facade.
The Parker crowd lived in a state of voluntary obliviousness to everything that would have cracked their happy little shells. Now they hold up those silly fantasies as matrices for how things should be today. That’s what makes them so embarrassing when they’re not being downright dangerous.
I think during the 1960’s, Ms. Parker also missed the rise of the stand-up comedians who used lots of profanity.
Vietnam changed this country…we knew after Vietnam that the Eisenhower prediction was right and the Supreme Court has confirmed that as well. By the time Bobby was killed half of America celebrated….when JFK was killed all of America stopped dead in its tracks.