Civility bullshit?

From Peter Baker, in the NYT: "Insults, Expletives and Fat-Shaming: Vance Trolls Critics on the Right and Left/The vice president has dispensed with the decorum and restraint of his predecessors to directly take on opponents and journalists on social media with sometimes profane and often personal jabs" (gift link).

It's only "civility bullshit" — for the purposes of my blog tag — if the person calling out incivility would take a different position if the purported incivility were coming from someone on his own side. 

I like the inclusion of Vance's self-defense: "I tend to err on the side of openness. That’s probably a generational thing, right? I come from a very tech-forward generation." That is, if you don't get me, maybe that means you're old. And: "I think one of the good things about social media is that it actually exposes you to unfiltered raw opinions, and that’s one of the things that I need to hear as a political leader."

And I had to laugh at this quote from a law professor: "Vice President Vance’s willingness publicly to disparage others in personal terms stands apart from the behavior of modern vice presidents during the last half-century.... [I]t departs from the norms associated with the office and undermines the goal of promoting rational public discourse."

Notice the lawprof specified "modern vice presidents." Is that designed to keep us from looking for nasty quips in the complete quotations of John Adams and Aaron Burr?

"There was a cult of Fauci. People were getting Fauci tattoos and dancing with images of Fauci."

"He really was on the cover of every magazine, which, if you think about it, was weird! If millions of Americans suddenly made me their cult leader, and I had previously just been an unknown short man in the back of an HIV press conference, I would go insane with power too. So would you. And when you see lockdowns in the context of a power-drunk elf getting turned on by the idea of canceling Easter—he’s typing so fast he can barely keep up—you can understand better what we all lived through. For him, the pleasure was canceling things, especially things he felt gave power to the right (sports, family gatherings, religious events). We can never forget the freaks who gain power in a centrally controlled system...."

Writes Nellie Bowles in "I Am the Most Famous and Talked-About Person in the Country" (The Free Press).

So do "freaks... gain power in a centrally controlled system"? Or does the power that's there to be gained  in a centrally controlled system make freaks out of people? Bowles must mean the latter, because she'd saying she would "go insane" under the same circumstances and "So would you."

About that "dancing with images":

Flash back to the paid vaccine pushers!!! Never forget!!! pic.twitter.com/FxouJOmKNL

— Freedom Forever (@Freedom49503795) November 6, 2023

About what I boldfaced above: I'm up for taunting Fauci over the things Fauci deserves to be taunted for, but having repeated fun over his height seems... well, it seems like Obama's thing about balding:

"There are times when I watch him, and I think to myself, this can't be real. Like, this can't be America. America. You've heard of us. We're great...."

ADDED: Collins is great in this interview. Watch to the end to fully appreciate.

A phrase I didn't think I'd ever heard used as a slur turns out to have been slung as slur in the most important movie in the history of this blog.

Remember the post from a few days ago about the lawsuit involving a woman who allegedly bared her chest and said "I bet your little Asian, fish head wife doesn’t have these cannons." I didn't believe anyone would say that, in part because I didn't recognize "fish head" as a standard slur.

But now I see that I had heard it before, because I'd seen the movie "Gran Torino." Twice. In fact, "Gran Torino" is the most important movie in the history of this blog. Click the tag — "Gran Torino" — and start at the bottom, the earliest post, to relive the movie's interweaving with my life story. 

I've updated the old post now, based on this email from a reader: "In the Clint Eastwood Movie Gran Torino, there is a scene where he is invited to party by the girl he has befriended. The party is next door and everyone (except Eastwood) is Hmong. Eastwood makes a reference to them as 'Fish Heads.'"

Here's the scene:

"The group’s musical cocktail of symphonic arrangements blended with horns and pop was met with particular contempt by Rolling Stone magazine..."

"... which tended to look askance at anything but unadulterated rock, the music historian John Covach said. Writing in the magazine in 1969, Jon Landau said, 'The listener responds to the illusion that he is hearing something new when in fact he is hearing mediocre rock, OK jazz, etc., thrown together in a contrived and purposeless way.'"

From "David Clayton-Thomas, Lead Singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Dies at 84/He was also the key lyricist of the Grammy-winning, genre-blending band, whose hits included 'Spinning Wheel,' 'And When I Die' and 'You’ve Made Me So Very Happy'" (NYT).

The headline gives the impression that Blood, Sweat & Tears wrote "And When I Die." In the 7th paragraph of the obituary, Laura Nyro is given proper credit. Save your "when I die" bons mots. Laura Nyro died 29 years ago. 

"Her famous dad was mostly absent for the first six years of her life, but she still manages to write about him with the sort of girlish affection..."

"... that many daughters reserve for their fathers. Things weren’t always so pretty. Her father was raised in a brothel in Peoria, Ill., where he witnessed the constant terror of violence and rape. His father was a pimp. His grandmother, who raised him, ran the family sex business. But Pryor escaped, using comedy as an outlet for his trauma...."

Writes Lauretta Charlton, in "Richard Pryor’s Daughter Grapples With a Flawed Father and a Hateful Word/Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor’s new book, 'Something We Said,' is at once a memoir and a history of a racial slur" (NYT).

It sounds as though the book expands on Pryor's TED Talk from 2019. Pryor, the daughter, became a history teacher, and she had an experience with a student quoting a line from "Blazing Saddles" — which her father co-wrote — and saying the "n-word" as part of the quote. She asked "Why not connect [Richard Pryor's] legacy with her own by becoming a foremost scholar of the n-word?"

Here's the TED Talk:

Side note: I'm reading about Richard Pryor's contributions to the "Blazing Saddles" script and see that he was especially pleased with this line:

"He's just an outright pig. He's like a pig... He's like a pig. That's what he reminds me of."

"You know, I come up with good names for people. I don't want to stick him with that one. Although, I think pigs would be very upset about it. It's just a terrible thing. I mean, I watch it happening. It's unfolding. It's really history because there's never been a guy like that that's ever run for office at any level. I don't think at any level...."

I don't know what's especially piglike about Graham Platner. I don't know why Trump thinks he's displayed his great talent for name calling here. "Pig" is like something a child would come up with as an insulting name.

Platner, in real life, is associated with a particular animal, the oyster, so I'd be more impressed by an oyster-related epithet. Don't distract us with another animal, however disgusting. Oysters are pretty disgusting — slimy, blobby, brainless, inert. Why go looking for other animals?

Speaking of oysters, I ran across oysters in this abstruse passage that came up in my reading yesterday: "Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."

"[S]o much of what I see online and so much of what I hear women say is, 'Men are trash.'"

Says Nadja Spiegelman in "America Has a Masculinity Crisis/A much-needed, nuanced conversation about masculinity and feminism today" (NYT).

She continues: "Sabrina Carpenter said that the key to her songwriting is just to call men stupid in as many ways as you can. I really understand where women’s anger comes from. I have lived it. But I also feel so much tenderness for my brother, for other men I know. And if I were hearing the same kinds of messages in reverse that were just, 'Women are trash,' I wouldn’t know how to begin to approach the world. And so I wonder how — specifically on the left, because I think that there are different answers to this on the right — specifically on the left, which is where I hear men are trashed the most loudly, what effect is this having on boys? Do they hear it? Do they feel it? Is it empowering for women? Is there another way to approach this?"

"I have no patience, incidentally, with those whataboutery critics invoking the Inquisition and the Crusades to diss Leo’s credentials."

"Nationalism, imperialism, fascism and communism are already far bigger killers than Catholicism, despite having been around for much less time. The main reason for that is, besides being inefficient, it is morally repugnant to most people to kill face to face, but to do it from a distance — with a machinegun, with artillery, with an aerial bomb, with a drone, now with a robot controlled by an algorithm — has become progressively easier over the past 150 years. As the Pope says, not 'seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.' That is why he has called for 'the strictest ethical constraints' on the use of AI in warfare. He is right, obviously. I hate AI. But then I think social media has been a disaster and I don’t much like predictive texting, spellcheck or digital train tickets either. I’d have pulled the plug on the whole shebang in 2006, after email, Wikipedia and YouTube but before any of the other nonsense. But hey, I am also a realist.... We have to live with this madness. Given that, why would we let a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits decide what’s ethical AI and what isn’t?"

Writes Robert Crampton, in "Pope Leo’s come out all guns blazing against the AI war machine. Good/Allowing a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits to decide what is and isn’t ethical would be madness" (London Times).

My first draft of this post had one more sentence, but I decided to cut it because I think it's dumb and distracting. For the record, it's "They would blow up the world, as Pope Leo didn’t quite say but I’ll say it for him, if they thought it would bag them a hot babe with fake boobs." But what do you think of the sexualized analysis? The tech leaders are "super-rich weird nerdy misfits" driven by sexual frustration. I used to read analysis like that all the time 60 years ago, when Freudianism was still going strong. It's interesting, but that doesn't make it true. If these men are super-rich, can't they find sexual partners? And why fake boobs? Also, isn't it gauche these days to disparage the neurodivergent with insults like "weird nerdy misfits"?

I remember when a major political party in the United States got the idea that calling a weird person "weird" would be an effective way to win a presidential election. 

"Honestly, before this, I had never heard of Spencer Pratt. The thing I am concerned [about] and feel about him is that I feel like..."

"... he’s exploiting the grief of people in the Palisades, and I just think that’s just reprehensible."

Said L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, fighting for reelection and surprised by this upstart, quoted in "Karen Bass is terrible at this" (Washington Examiner).

The feeling I get:

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Oh! I found the "ratbag" video!

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We discussed the Rod Stewart quote based on the text alone, yesterday, here.

"May I say, well done in the Americas. You were superb, absolutely superb. Put that little ratbag in his place."

Said Rod Stewart, quoted in "Rod Stewart hails King Charles for putting ‘ratbag’ Trump ‘in his place’/The singer made the remark during a line-up at a 50th anniversary concert for the King’s Trust at the Royal Albert Hall, London" (London Times).

Did King Charles put Trump in his place? Maybe it's like that "bike rage" incident with Benedict Cumberbatch we were talking about yesterday. Two entirely nonviolent men stopped to exchange a few sharp words. 

The commenters over there at the London Times are going after Rod. Top-rated comment: "Rod Stewart put the King and Queen in a very embarrassing position by making political comments in a receiving line. It just shows he has no class whatsoever and doesn’t have the brains he was born with."

And: "Ah, Rod Stewart who made millions for being a hedonistic rockstar boasted about numerous, groupies, and rampant infidelity calling somebody else a 'ratbag' while shaking hand with the highest example of infidelity. Must have his picture in the dictionary next to hypocrite!"

Is this the first appearance of the word "ratbag" on this blog? No, it came up here, where I quoted the NYT obituary for Barry Humphries ("Dame Edna"). The NYT has printed "ratbag" a few times. In a 1984 piece about travel guidebooks, it has: "[I]n a section on 'picturesque patterns of speech'... the 'Maverick Guide to Australia' tells us that a bicyclist there is called a bikey, that to grizzle means to complain and that a ratbag is an eccentric character."

Well, Trump surely is an eccentric character. He should own it. Kind of cool too — isn't it? — in the American way of thinking — to have Rod Stewart calling you a "ratbag."

ADDED: Let's also consider the notion of putting someone "in their place." It reflects a background belief that people have a social rank or a station in life. For Rod Stewart — who, I hear, started from gasoline alley — to praise the King — a person of the highest rank — for putting someone "in their place" is pretty funny. And, we're told, the King just laughed. And didn't that put Rod in his place?

Take me back, carry me back down the gasoline alley where I started from....

"It was an emotional reaction. I never imagined the gravity of it all."

Said Agostina Páez, a white Argentine woman, on trial for something she did when she was a tourist in Brazil.

She's quoted in "When Racism Is a Crime: Brazil Puts a Tourist on Trial for Word and Gesture/An Argentine woman, who is white, could face years in prison after being accused of racism. The case has set off intense debate in Argentina and Brazil" (NYT).

The video, recorded in January by an employee of the bar, showed Agostina Páez imitating a monkey and uttering a racist slur as she walked away.... Ms. Páez has said, online and in interviews, that the bar overcharged her and two Argentine friends. Then, as the women left, she claimed, the employees made obscene gestures toward them. 

Security camera footage from the bar, reviewed by The New York Times, appears to show an employee taunting the tourists as they were leaving the bar.

Here's the seemingly trivial interplay:

A statement from the prosecutor: "Brazil is being painted as this authoritarian country when we are only seeking justice for the harm done."

"Thank you, Lord, thank you for making me who I was and not some little squirming powerless nincompoop."

"Thank you for making me unique, one of a kind, incomparable, victorious."

That's the "deathbed prayer," offered by a character in the novel "Vigil," by George Saunders, which Ezra Klein quotes to Saunders to begin the discussion "George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin" (NYT).

That was a pretty strong way to begin the interview, and I'll bet Klein — as well as Saunders — thinks of himself unique, one of a kind, incomparable, and victorious. Surely, they're not little squirming powerless nincompoops.

"Nincompoop" seems like a word that would be examined in "Why Kids Are Starting to Sound Like Their Grandparents/The strange resurgence of words like 'yap' and 'skedaddle,'" (a NYT article blogged at that link). And it also reminded me of that George Will column blogged yesterday — "JD Vance vies for the gold medal in coarseness and flippancy" — the one that took umbrage at Vance's deployment of the insult "dipshit." If only Vance had been in on the kids' new trend and cared a little more about the problem of coarseness and flippancy, he could have said "nincompoop." Note how the excrement is discretely included.

The word "nincompoop" is, the OED says, first seen c1668 in the form of this title, which will give you lots of ideas for old words that could resurge: "The ship of fools fully fraught and richly laden with asses, fools, jack-daws, ninnihammers, coxcombs, slender-wits, shallowbrains, paper-skuls, simpletons, nickumpoops, wiseakers, dunces, and blockheads."

The first use of the word "nincompoop" in The New York Times came in August of 1861, recounting the statement of then-Congressman John Sherman: "[Congressman Samuel Sullivan 'Sunset'] Cox called [Sherman's] own constituents 'Nincompoops, intelligent baboons dressed up as Wide-Awakes, Gump-heads, mutton-heads, blabber, Dogbanes, toadies, and bloats, Suppose he [Sherman] should speak thus of [Cox's] Democratic constituents, would they not set him down as unfit to represent decent people?'"

Bloviate.

From a biography of Warren G. Harding:

That was sent to me by my son Chris, who is quite far along toward his goal of reading a biography of every U.S. President. 

In the 22-year history of this blog, I've never used the word "bloviate." Twice, though, I've quoted someone else:

1. My November 1, 2019 post, "An impeachment trial would help Joe Biden — because Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Cory Booker would all face the obligation to do their job as Senator," quoted NY Magazine writer Ed Kilgore, who wrote:  "[An impeachment trial] could be a boon to non-senators — particularly Joe Biden, who can bloviate to his heart’s desire about the lessons he learned on impeachment and all the issues involving Trump during his 44 years as a member or presiding officer of the Upper Chamber...." 

2. On October 7, 2004, the first year of this blog, I quoted Al Franken, who was boasting about his radio show on the radio network Air America: "We do a different kind of show. I'm not the mirror image of Rush Limbaugh. I do a totally different kind of show. I don't bloviate for three hours and pull stuff out of my butt and mislead and lie. We're very scrupulous about our facts. I'm proud of that." (I do go on to quip about whether Franken "did in fact bloviate," so count that as my using the word if you must, but I'm really still essentially quoting him.)

In both of those instances, the user of "bloviate" is insulting someone else. President Harding, the popularizer of the word, used it about himself, self-deprecatingly. 

***

Here's the biography — commission earned — "Warren G. Harding: The American Presidents Series: The 29th President, 1921-1923." Warning: It's by John Dean. Chris says: "It’s part of a series of very short books that I use when the options are very limited." He's relied on that series to read about William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, and Benjamin Harrison.

Notorious crackhead and grifter...

The White House distributed a print-out to reporters in the briefing room listing out “365 wins” from President Trump’s year back in office. #243 stands out: “Stripped notorious crackhead and grifter Hunter Biden of his taxpayer-funded secret service detail.” pic.twitter.com/LtpAC1wPGY

— Elizabeth Landers (@ElizLanders) January 20, 2026

Have you experienced this "Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right" or is the NYT pushing it at us to foment contempt for conservatives?

I'm reading "After Renee Good Killing, Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right/Vocal Trump supporters are demonizing Renee Good, her partner and their allies, with some even using an acronym: AWFUL, or Affluent White Female Urban Liberal" by Clyde McGrady.

I hadn't seen this term, and I read all sorts of things every day, so that makes me think this term isn't really a thing... though I've certainly noticed that people of the right are passing around a lot of videos of highly emotional left-wing white women.

But then I asked Meade, and he had heard the term and it seems to be catching on. 

Needless to say, I don't like the term. I don't like expressions of contempt and I don't like commentators  trading on the idea that women are over-emotional. I also don't like freaking out and yelling in public (or at home), but you can say just that, without contributing to sex-based hatred. 

Despite that NYT headline, McGrady's column isn't really about the term AWFUL. It's more about the phenomenon of going after activist liberal white women:

First Ladies read a Christmas story.

It's not a competition. We cherish diversity of expression. It's all a matter of taste...

 

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ADDED: Sorry, I didn't see the slur on Melania's name until I put this up. I am offering the contrast among the ladies in a neutral spirit. Anyone who assumes Michelle's reading is superior to Melania's is simply being very conventional.

AND: Here's the full reading by Melania:

"President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants... calling them 'garbage' he does not want in the United States..."

"... in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.... 'These are people that do nothing but complain,' Mr. Trump said at the tail end of a cabinet meeting at the White House.... 'When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,' Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement. He said Somalia 'stinks and we don’t want them in our country.' He described Representative Ilhan Omar... as 'garbage.'... 'She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage....'... Mr. Trump has used this kind of rhetoric throughout his rise in politics, including in his first term as president, when he demanded to know why the United States would accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations, which he described as 'shithole countries'...."

From "Trump Calls Somalis ‘Garbage’ He Doesn’t Want in the Country/President Trump has a history of insulting people from African countries, but the outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry. Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement" (NYT).

I watched this performance live yesterday, and I believe I said out loud, "He's choosing to resonate with racists."

Trump and Mamdani, together at last.

Question 1 (to Trump): You called him a communist! Question 2 (to Mamdani): You called him a fascist!

Trump: "And I've been called much worse than a despot, so it's not — it's not that insulting."

Later, Mamdani is pressured again: "Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?" And Trump breaks in: "That's okay, you can just say it. It's easier than explaining."

Trump and Mamdani displayed their unity: They're both practical and they both want what's good for New York. The press kept confronting them with the way they've insulted each other, but neither man took the bait. They were stunningly relaxed and friendly and entirely able to slough off each other's political remarks.