I don\u2019t have my copy of Norman Mailer\u2019s Armies of the Night<\/em> on my lap. A few years ago, I loaned it to someone who took it with her when she drifted out of my life. But among the sections that have stuck in my head, more or less intact, is one where Mailer digresses from recounting his speech to assembled antiwar protestors, to a general defense of vulgarity. <\/p>\n If I\u2019m reconstructing this right, he flashes back to one of his old army squad-mates, a Southerner, who finds his bowels in sudden, urgent need of relief. After doing the honors in the middle of a Filipino rice paddy, the man returns, beaming, and reports, \u201cMan, I just managed to take me a noble shit.\u201d To Mailer, Johnny Reb\u2019s unlettered, country-boy wisdom \u2014 shit can also be noble \u2014 sums up the foundation of America\u2019s democratic spirit.<\/p>\n Mailer was right, at least to the point that vulgarity has always featured prominently in the songs and verse of the common people, or the vulgus. The English tavern song, \u201cA Man\u2019s Yard,\u201d which dates to 1600, challenges listeners:<\/p>\n Reed me a riddle: What is this It is a stiffe shorte fleshy pole (It could be added: \u201cYett this fyne stave, so cruellie,\/was cutte from Norton\u2019s Anthology.\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n Of course, the better sort of people did get into the act. (General Patton famously said that no man could call himself a gentleman unless he could swear for three minutes without repeating himself.) But they often aimed upward. When Napoleon called Prince Talleyrand \u201cshit in a silk stocking,\u201d he was speaking not just as an emperor to a minister, but also as a Corsican lawyer\u2019s son to a member of the old aristocracy. Back to the subject of members, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, made speaking filth to power into a nearly respectable art form. In his \u201cSatyre,\u201d he wrote \u2014 not unjustly \u2014 of Charles II:<\/a><\/p>\n Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such, What does any of this have to do with Catholicism? Well, lots. With its countless news services, online publications, blogs and social media, the Internet has permanently tweaked the geometry of ecclesial power. True enough, the bishops are still formally in charge; their voices are the ones that count, ultimately. But those voices are by no means the most engaging or colorful. Nor are they the loudest. It\u2019s become quite easy for an ordinary schmo to cuss out a high-ranking churchman before a very large audience, as atheist blogger Hemant Mehta did Monsignor Charles Pope.<\/a> In this case, the unflappable monsignor responded with great dignity, charity, and intellectual acuity.<\/a> Whether or not Mehta meant to, he ended up opening a dialogue. Both pieces \u2014 Mehta\u2019s thrust and Pope\u2019s parry \u2013 drew plenty of traffic. From those points of view, a good time was had by all. <\/p>\n But encounters where high and low square off like equals are still exceptional. More typically, one nobody will take her mark against another nobody. If either of these cyphers has a gift for writing, self-promotion, or both, observers will tweet their exchange, comment on it, and share it on Facebook, affecting the sensus fidelium<\/em> in a tangible way.<\/p>\n Yesterday, Patheos saw one of these culturally significant bleacher brawls. Incensed by a video broadcast over YouTube by St. Michael\u2019s Media head Michael Voris, blogger Calah Alexander declared it a \u201csteaming crock of shit.\u201d<\/a> Within hours, Patrick Madrid invited her to defend herself on his radio show. She did, and later published a blog post in which she justified her choice of words at even greater length.<\/a> Where language is concerned, she argues, the lines separating the proper from the improper are mainly arbitrary: <\/p>\n Unless we all start saying \u201coh biscuits\u201d as a society. Then, eventually, it would take on the same connotation as crap. And then you would have a radio show where someone would call in and suggest saying the neutral word \u201ccrap\u201d instead of the offensive \u201cbiscuits.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Calah\u2019s right that standards of propriety sometimes wilt under close inspection. (Even Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted he had a hard time defining pornography while still insisting, \u201cI know it when I see it.\u201d) But if the dread s-word didn\u2019t invalidate her post, it did help to pigeonhole it as a gut response. Those are polarizing by nature \u2014 either you identify with them wholeheartedly, or you take them as proof that the user\u2019s not worth trusting. Many of the responses to Calah\u2019s piece fell to either side. \u201cCalah, your honesty and frankness just might save the world one day,\u201d wrote one reader. \u201cWow, you youngsters sure can be ugly,\u201d posted another.<\/p>\n But if Calah was vulgar in this instance, Michael Voris, her target, is consistently vulgar in a different way. He makes his living as a full-time demagogue. An understated review in CatholicCulture.org warns<\/a> of his \u201ctendency to over-simply complex cultural, ecclesiastical and theological problems, leading sometimes to the assertion of mere opinion as the \u2018real Catholic\u2019 position.\u201d In fact, in his broadcasts, whether on the \u201canti-Catholic\u201d nature of \u201cAmazing Grace\u201d or \u201cearth-worshipper\u201d environmentalists, Voris adopts a kind of Newspeak. This was the language invented by George Orwell in 1984<\/em>, and and Umberto Eco defines it in generic terms <\/a> as \u201can impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax\u201d meant to \u201climit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.\u201d Voris\u2019 words may have more than four letters, but they create pretty much the same effect.<\/p>\n Actually, Eco has Voris\u2019 number on a few points. In his essay, \u201cEternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt,\u201d he lists \u201cobscure instincts and unfathomable drives\u201d around which fascism may \u201ccoagulate.\u201d Read through it, and you\u2019ll find plenty of Voris tropes: a cult of tradition; the rejection of modernity; a cult of action in which life is lived for struggle. <\/p>\n
\nYou hold it in your hande when you pisse?
\nIt is a kind of pleasinge stinge,
\nA pricklinge and a pleasinge thinge.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nThat fittes to stopp a Maydens hole;
\nIt is Venus wanton stayinge Wand
\nThat ne\u2019er had feet, and yett can stande.<\/p>\n
\nAnd love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
\nNor are his high desires above his strength:
\nHis scepter and his prick are of a length;
\nAnd she may sway the one who plays with th\u2019 other,
\nAnd make him little wiser than his brother.<\/em><\/p>\n