This Is Not The Time To Spit On The Table

Donald Trump takes fire from Representative Rashda Tlaib (photos by Detroit Metro Times)

As reported yesterday (this is Huffington’s post):

“Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) went from her swearing-in as one of the first Muslim women in Congress to cursing out President Donald Trump within a matter of hours on Thursday.

Tlaib told the crowd at an event hosted by progressive group MoveOn:

“And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I say, ‘Baby, they don’t.’ Because we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker”.”

To which, as NBC reported, newly-re-elected Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, remarked, 

"Generationally, that would not be language I would use, but nonetheless, I don’t think we should make a big deal of it."

Pelosi also said that what Tlaib said was "nothing worse than the president has said," and that the episode "consolidates his base, but I don’t think they need much consolidation." 

She added that while she was "not in the censorship business ... 

I don't like that language, I wouldn't use that language, but I wouldn't establish language standards for my colleagues."

I’m no position to be a scold (an old-fashioned word, I know) or a comportment Nazi—there are many times in my life when I’ve uttered that phrase, mostly in my head, but in rare moments of anger or in extremis pain I’ve said it out right out loud. And it is no secret that my feelings about Mr. Trump are scalding hot and overflow with a very profane four-letter alphabet soup. And yet…and yet.

It doesn’t feel like a “generational thing” to me. Though I am younger, by nine years, than Pelosi, her generation and mine are close enough in traditional American social culture to have been raised to be wary of unleashed invective and profanity. But, it must be said, Speaker Pelosi and I and our overlapping generations of mostly white and relatively privileged Americans too often tried to maintain our parents’ language rules (“standards” to use Ms. Pelosi’s word) that were unrealistic, filled with cultural hubris, foolishly pompous, and were patently insensitive to those who didn’t sound like, look like, or live like, us.

What I do know is that my parents and my grandparents were cautious if not downright withholding in their use of profanity’s most biting bullets. My father was very blunt in his advice to me on the subject: “Just don’t. Not only does it makes you sound ugly, it makes you look ugly.” In all the years I knew him, I can’t recall any time when any of George Carlin’s classic seven dirty word slipped his lips. Not once. In more than five decades.

It isn’t a prudish thing—at least not for me. Lord knows I’ve enjoyed the hot language of many a standup comic, men and women, whose entire routines are founded on the cornerstones of Bruce, Carlin, Pryor, and Williams. From Sarah Silverman to Wanda Sykes, to Janeane Garafalo, to Iliza Shlesinger (Elder Millennial), I laugh with total gender indifference. Which is to say, I am fine with raw words in the right places, which is to say further, “right places” as defined by my sensitivities.

It isn’t a religious thing—Pelosi is a Catholic, I’m a Protestant, Tlaib is a Muslim—at the shared heart of our Christian and Muslim faiths is a desire to be kind and civil both in tongue and deed. That is not to say we always achieve the kindly desires to which we aspire. Great pain, anger, frustration, outrage, personal affront, defense of family or cause, a need to scream our truth frequently often collide in our lives to overrule our better-natured angels and when we believe we are targets, we reach to our pistol of rhetoric, and fire those words, point-blank if need be, to send a message of hurt right back to the source.

Been there. Done it. Usually, but not always, regretted it.

No, it’s not a generational thing, or prudish thing, or a religious thing. It’s a commonsense thing. It’s a be-bigger-than-that thing. It’s a don’t-play-their-game thing. It’s an unintended consequences thing. 

When Representative Tlaib went off on Trump, she gave him everything he could have possibly wanted in that moment. She gave him an angry basket of Palestinian-American-child-of-immigrants, woman, single mom, Muslim, Democrat, and activist. That is the basket from which Trump and his base get all their red meat. And, in one fiery moment, Tlaib put that basket on the opposition’s front porch. Big mistake, in my opinion.

In a sense, it was also a spit-on-the-table thing, at least for me. There was a 1947 movie, The Hucksters, starring Clark Gable and Sydney Greenstreet, in which Greenstreet, in the role of overbearing, slimy, corporate tycoon Evan Llewellyn Evans, spits a great wad of sputum onto a polished boardroom table. Looking at Gable’s shocked character, a World War II veteran named Victor Albee Norman, Evans says, “You’ve just seen me do a disgusting thing. You will always remember what I just did.” 

Sydney Greenstreet, in The Hucksters, spitting on boardroom table

Two points: First, I saw that movie more than 50 years ago, and I still remember the name of the movie and the quote; and, second, saying “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker,” is nothing less than spitting a wad of sputum on the newly-polished table of the House of Representatives.

Yes, it sent the message Rep. Tlaib wanted to send; yes, it was memorable for its directness; and yes, it will make no difference to the national conversation about Trump’s immorality, amorality, crudeness, vacuousness, and usurpation of the office of the presidency. No invective, no head-on, full-winded epithet-filled attack works to deter Trump. He feeds on it. He breathes it. He offers it to his base on a daily basis.

Like Nancy Pelosi, I am no guardian of standards of language for Members of the House or Senate, but unlike Speaker Pelosi, I don’t mind offering Rep. Tlaib a word of advice as a former Hill press secretary: “Hold your fire; use your passion creatively; don’t become a videoclip; don’t become the tool others will use for and against you; and, most of all, as quaint as it may sound, you are in the People’s House now, so please don’t spit on our table to make a point.”