Daily Mail, February 27 2002

When Stephen Byers’s permanent secretary, Sir Richard Mottram, realised that it was impossible for him to extricate his department from the Martin Sixsmith imbroglio, the air turned blue.

‘We’re all f*****’, he reputedly told another civil servant. ‘I’m f*****. You’re f*****. The while department’s f*****. It’s been the biggest cock-up ever and we’re all completely f*****.’

This erudite and dignified sally has been reported with great merriment and not a little satisfaction that such an august luminary should have descended from Mount Olympus to the verbal level of the gutter.

Sir Richard, however, was hardly alone in his ripe use of language. Russell Crowe, winner of the best actor award at the BAFTAs for his role as a schizophrenic mathematician in A Beautiful Mind, fired off a volley of four-letter abuse at a fan who had the temerity to take his picture.

On a recent radio programme the comic Ali G ended a cascade of lewd and insulting remarks about lesbian sex, ejaculation, homosexuality and the ‘spasticated’ Pop Idol Gareth Gates, by using the word ‘motherf*****’, the same graceful epithet employed by Madonna when she presented the Turner prize for modern art.

It’s not just obscenities that are now on routine display in the public arena. There has been a general coarsening of public discourse, in which profane language is but a part. The presenter of the BAFTAs, the actor Stephen Fry, belied his urbane and charming image when his patter included tasteless and utterly gratuitous innuendos about his sexual exploits in Soho, touching up an actor who played a rent boy in the film about Oscar Wilde and sucking Kate Winslet’s socks before ending by saying, ‘That’s enough tedious w*** from me, let’s party’.

Stephen Fry is a clever and amusing man. Why do such talented performers feel the need to degrade their language and themselves in this fashion? For this is not the same as using expletives as a catharsis for anger or exasperation. This is just casual everyday crudity, and all the more troubling for being so prosaic and mundane.

But then how can the BBC, once the guardian of Reithian ideals of elevating popular culture, be expected to grasp the depths to which it is sinking when its director-general, Greg Dyke, sets the tone by telling his staff to ‘cut the crap?’

Some of this is simply being done to gain attention. Ali G managed to get himself written about for days after his performance, to the benefit no doubt of his audience figures; and Madonna transparently used the same word in order to draw attention to herself.

It must be hard, if one has carved out a reputation for making fools out of people or for sexual sensationalism on stage, to find new ways of shocking everyone. We live, after all, in an age defined by the smashing of taboos. It’s all part of the assault on bourgeois codes of behaviour, on the suburban, on the respectable -- all damned as repressive, oppressive and generally ludicrous.

But as taboos get smashed, new ones have to emerge as candidates for enlightened destruction. So the frontiers of shockability get pushed ever outwards. Those who object can be safely sneered at as Mrs Grundys. To be boorish is to be cutting edge and contemporary. Laddishness is the new black.

But taboos were invented for a purpose. They set limits to behaviour for good reason. Profane language has been taboo because it is crude and aggressive. It degrades the user and abuses the recipient.

Moreover, words influence attitudes and behaviour. Profanity embodies an absence of self-restraint. It is a sign that the speaker is not in control. The person who sees no reason for restraint in language often sees no reason for restraint in behaviour either. When Russell Crowe learned that his acceptance speech at the BAFTA awards had been cut from the BBC show, he pinned the director against the wall and said: ‘You f****** piece of s***, I’ll make sure you’ll never work in Hollywood’.

Such verbal and physical aggression is by no means confined to showbiz luvvies. Go to any park playground and you will hear tiny tots issuing streams of profanities as part of their casual conversation. There was once a time when parents would have disciplined foul-mouthed offspring; now, parents are using the same language in front of and even towards their own children.

At the same time, aggression and violence are increasing among younger and younger children as well as their parents, as any teacher will tell you. What all this indicates is a disturbing loss of self-restraint and control.

Whether through ignorance or laziness, people are less and less able or willing to find the appropriate words to express what they want to say. They are also less and less willing to curb their behaviour when they do not get what they want, increasingly using violence as a replacement for talking, negotiation and compromise.

It is sadly commonplace to see a young mother swearing at her child before giving it a clout, while failing completely to deal with the child’s bad behaviour. Both the words and the actions show someone who is not in control and just lashing out wildly with both tongue and fist. The abuse of language and of behaviour go together.

What is perhaps most disturbing about the casualisation of profanity is what this says about attitudes to other people. Using crude expressions for bodily functions or body parts as terms of abuse embodies a deep contempt for others. It is the verbal expression of a most alarming development, the erosion of empathy or consideration for other people.

This loss of proper feeling for others can be laid squarely at the door of the breakdown of the family. The casual dumping of one parent by another, or indeed the removal of the father altogether from the child’s world, teaches a terrible lesson: that other people are disposable.

In their fractured emotional universe, the children of broken homes cannot learn the first lesson of socialisation; that other people matter, and that to show them respect and consideration one must practise self-restraint.

Instead, they learn that the self comes first, that restraint is for losers, and that they have a ‘right’ to demand what they want. And they are filled with incoherent rage at what they have lost, a rage and aggression that finds an outlet in both foul language and yobbish behaviour.

We have a yob culture of hooliganism, vandalism, a breakdown of order in the classroom and violence on the streets.

In this self-obsessed, narcissistic age where instant gratification is all that matters and the needs of others are a dreadful inconvenience or bore, the four-letter language of contempt and aggression is the all-too-appropriate means of communication. The flippant, knowing crudities of our élites are simply yobbery chic.

Posted by admin at February 27, 2002