Posted: 07/10/07

When Vulgarians Seize a Culture

When unwashed, obscenity-spewing comedian George Carlin was arrested at Summerfest in Milwaukee back in 1972, it was because of the moral outrage of a police officer named Elmer Lenz. His wife and his little boy were in the audience, and he had the temerity to resent the filthy language hitting them in the face. Being a decent man, he got up to do something about it and reported it to a senior officer who arrested the comedian. Now, all these years later, he's gotten over it. The whole episode doesn't matter anymore. How very sad that it doesn't.

A columnist from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Jim Stingl, wrote about Lenz's more mellow views, 35 years after he called for Carlin's arrest for public obscenity.

"Lenz long ago cooled off. Just a couple weeks ago, he noticed a George Carlin special was on HBO, so he watched it. "I sat there and laughed a few times," he admitted.  "He was funny."

Sometimes a nation's epitaph can be written in just two sentences. Nearly everyone is used to those seven dirty words now, aren't they? Just as people exposed to bad smells don't notice them after a time, these words just don't shock anymore. That's why a recent movie, big with the teen crowd,  chalked up so many uses of the F-word that a reviewer lost count after 200.

Over the years, George Carlin's episode at Summerfest has taken on the burnished quality of a folk tale, where a fearless warrior stands in the face of fear and hang-ups and advances an important cause. He even says he wouldn't have changed anything about his toilet-talk routine even if he had known children were present in the audience. Here's his famous quote. Perhaps it will even make it into Carlin's obituary some day.

"I think children need to hear those words the most because as yet they don't have the hang-ups.  It's the adults who are locked into certain thought patterns."

Indeed adults are locked into thought and speech patterns, Mr. Carlin, and thanks to men like you who have fought for the cause of obscene and filthy language, those patterns are now firmly rooted in the gutter.

In countless documentaries, the cultural revolution of the 1960's is presented as a time of great liberation, wonderful advances and above all, social progress. The promiscuity, the drug use, the rampant disrespect for authority, all of it is made to look like such a wonderful thing. The children who have had to live in the world created by that generation, including this writer, think otherwise. We now have network television that is so saturated by cheap sexuality and foul language that no family with any moral compass whatsoever can leave it on in prime time. (CBS has just been fined for a teen orgy scene in the series, "Without a Trace".) Popular music now billboards the rapper heirs of Carlin's libertine philosophy as they fill the air with words like "ho" and "bitch", terms that hardly raise an eyebrow among the young. But it's only people with hang-ups who object to these things, remember? They're just words, right?

It's never just a word. Words have meaning because they convey ideas, and ideas have consequences. The moral squalor rampant in American popular culture today continually worsens because people in this country have slowly, over time, lost their capacity for moral outrage. All too often, that outrage and indignation is turned on those who actually have the guts to object to the filth. Narrow minded bigots. Blue-nosed fundamentalists. We have a right to watch this stuff. You don't like it? Don't watch it! Who cares about what your children have to hear and look at? Who cares about innocence anymore? What an outdated concept. This is America! Sadly, it really is America, and what the neighbor kids watch does have a direct impact on our own children.

Worse still, many emerging pastors today are embracing the idea that foul language is a great way to engage the culture. A recent church baptism training video (intended to look like an MTV farce) features a pastor in a pool, preparing for a baptism, when someone does a cannon ball right behind him. The church thought it would be funny to bleep out what the pastor says, as though he is cussing. When the church starts becoming like the culture to supposedly win people, nowadays that includes the use of foul language. On the Christian news blog that I publish, I cannot even link to some church sites due to their use of vulgar language and their promotion of Hollywood filth. I frequently have to delete comments from Christian readers who use words like "su***", and cr**. Christians are joining the great stampede toward Gomorrah, and they justify it every step of the way. Those who oppose this kind of speech by believers are told to get over it.

I refuse to get over it. We are commanded in Scripture to be holy in our conversation, as that which becomes a child of God. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. If our conversation is peppered with vulgar and coarse speech, we have a serious heart problem that needs to be addressed. When we are made new in Christ, old things are passed away and all things are new. That includes our language. America's cultural darkness is worsening. Let the light of Christ shine ever brighter in the blackness as we imitate our Savior in all areas of conduct.

Only let your conversation be as it becomes the gospel of Christ...

--Philippians 1:27

By Ingrid Schlueter Email: vcyproducer@aol.com Click here for bio and archived articles