Read my lips,” said George Bush Sr at the 1988 Republican Convention in New Orleans. Voters read them and voted him.
Reading presidential lips is big risk these days, with a coprolalic president in the White House. He breathes bawdry. A coprolalic, for your info, is a person who uses obscene words uncontrollably.
Nice people in America—there are nice people in America, too, who work hard, give to charity, love their families, don’t cheat on wives, don’t jump red lights, respect other faiths, and read to children—would cringe if they read the presidential lips these days. More so if kids are around.
Know what happened this Easter Sunday? When those nice people were going to church for the morning mass, their president was letting the devil ride the fiddlestick. He cursed. This time at religious men. “You crazy b*******,” he called the ayatollahs of Iran. “Open the f****** [Hormuz] Strait” or else. And added, “Praise be to Allah”.
The Pope, aghast, cursed him with bell, book and candle, reading an Old Testament passage from Isaiah: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen—your hands are full of blood.”
Donald Trump | AFP
News anchors and headline editors were gobsmacked. A few ran the words in full, others said the prez had “used strong words”, a few others warned about “expletive-laden statements”. A TV host said, “If children are watching, be warned. The president did not use polite language.”
Samuel Huntington called the west’s war on the Islamic world a ‘clash of civilisations’. Banana oil! This is the war of a pyromaniacal pindari who is seeking to end a civilisation. He swore so.
Don Trump has come to be the epitome of all that’s boorish with the western world. He swears like a sailor, tells lies, breaks laws, sleeps with hookers, mouths obscenities at fellow-rulers, and does all things that genteel people abhor. In a single speech in Florida this month, he tossed out 10 ‘hells’, three ‘damns’ and a ‘crap’.
Not that his predecessors were boy scouts; many were mean and foul in their private lives, but rarely exhibited crudity in public discourse. Talking of exhibition, L.B. Johnson was an exception. When reporters asked in a private chat why the US was in Vietnam, the six-foot-four-incher unzipped his fly, drew out his ‘jumbo’ and declared, “This is why!”
Dick Nixon was profane up to the hilt of his nickname; we know that because he recorded much of what he said in the Oval Office. In chats with his aides, Nixon called Indira Gandhi a ‘bitch’ or a ‘witch’, Mexicans ‘dishonest’, and the blacks ‘a bunch of dogs’. In 2004, vice-president Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor to “f*** himself.” Compared with Trump’s foul words, these sound as pure and pious as pulpit speeches.
Trump’s abuses are different on many counts. Others had uttered abuses in private chats with aides, mentioned in third person, spoken at the spur of the moment, or expressed in home context. Never had rulers of a foreign regime, even if they were Idi Amins, Adolf Hitlers or Attila the Huns, been addressed by any president directly with such gutter words as Trump has.
But why swear at Trump? Profanity is spreading to political discourse in India too. Hate speeches, especially against minorities, are the order of the day in India’s national political discourse, and coarse language is becoming too common. Last week, Telangana CM Revanth Reddy told his Kerala counterpart Pinarayi Vijayan, in a rowdy way, to get lost (nee po mone); Vijayan returned the compliment calling Revanth the “son of a dash”.
Triumph of Trumpism? Our own barbarism.
prasannan@theweek.in