Culture Rant
August 20, 2000

Page 1 2

Learning from Lenny Bruce

I can't stand the guy for the most part, but Howard's sort of taken up where Lenny Bruce left us all hanging. If you told him to "speak PC" he'd probably fall off his chair laughing, and then get up and use language as a very effective, offensive, excruciatingly humbling tool to shut you up.

Howard Stern attracts Joe Buck from the fillin' station, Mr. Bateman from Manhattan, and Sara Smith from Duke University with equal aplomb, and so many "different" people listen to him because he's talking a lot, and, for the most part, saying something (when he's not begging women to show their tits and bend over).

Howard Stern understands Lenny Bruce. He knows that when Lenny said that the "word's suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness," he wasn't fooling around. Lenny Bruce spit every offensive, disgusting word into his microphone until it wasn't offensive anymore. Just say it, damnit, over and over, until it loses its meaning, because words only have as much power as we let them have.

If there's a battle between these guys and two PC liberals from Vermont, who's gonna change the world? Inspire action? Piss you off? It's not Saffron and Cody with their missionary ancestry, neatly writing down alternative ways to say things that are already emblazoned in our collective lingo.

Not that everyone should go around being hostile, aggressive, insulting, disrespectful. But isn't it more hostile and disrespectful to tiptoe over words, suppress what we're supposed to and then go bitch about it behind closed doors? Isn't that what leads to the violence and viciousness that Lenny Bruce was talking about? When you talk a lot about something, without anything much to say about it (think talk shows, magazines, PC classrooms) it's called sensationalizing - something that both junior high schoolers and America seems to be great at.

Take the show "Ellen". All that hype and anticipation built up by the media, swirling around the episode where she's supposed to kiss another woman. OK. So homosexuality was only hinted at in the past - movies showed a look, a quicksilver gesture - and boundaries have no doubt been beautifully broken in the last decades, but what about "Ellen"?

The same week everyone was talking about the forbidden kiss, and every ad, every tabloid was screaming about it, there was a Jerry Springer episode about women who dress like sluts, and the boyfriends that don't like it. The women came out, g-strings on, waving their butts at the camera, see-through lace over their nipples, parading around in full glory, audience members slapping their asses. The cameras didn't jerk away, there was no sudden commercial break. It was completely acceptable to show this, during the day, on a major network. And it's scandalous to show two people of the same sex kissing? Isn't one exploitative, sexist, and demeaning? And isn't the other an expression of love? Why has America gotten so twisted in its values? Maybe it's all that talking.

There's a hilarious, biting, insightful book called The Redneck Manifesto. It's not at all what it seems. This guy Jim Goad's put his heart and redneck soul into writing about classism, racism, and a huge part of his argument is aimed at the power of words. Like Lenny Bruce and Howard Stern, Goad talks a lot - and has gallons, tons, loads to say.

Besides sinking his sardonic opinions into the whole PC craze, Goad goes off about the danger of sensationalizing dangerous topics. Talking about the endless conversations about the "Race Problem" on TV, radio, etc, Goad says, "If you wish to transcend black and white, stop phrasing everything in those terms. Bombarding everyone with endless racial images is itself a form of racism. It effects a sort of mental segregation." And, another little ditty from the "Redneck Manifesto": "When you make something supremely untouchable, you lend it a power it wouldn't normally have." Kind of like a junior high school jock.