The Ugly American

I know this blog is already getting longer than the itemized national debt, but I simply can’t resist delivering up these sparkling and pithy tableau vivant from the past. I could keep you up all night just with funny stories about Mussolini.

Here’s a good one: Did you know that the “Kosher mob” gangster and founder of that ultimate American icon, Las Vegas, Bugsy Siegel, almost blew Muss’ brains out one night at the dinner table? Here’s the 411.

There once was a lady (well, sort of a lady) who was quite a character; the Countess Carla Dentice di Frasso, known as Countess Dorothy di Frasso, born Dorothy Caldwell Taylor in Watertown, New York. Like all American poor little rich girls, she just had to have a title, and Daddy’s money bought her a much older Italian gentleman, Count Dentice di Frasso. Together they poured her money into a run-down but gorgeous villa north of Rome called the Villa Madama. She had affairs with the best and brightest, devoured both Hollywood and Gary Cooper, and was a regular in what was once known as “cafe society.” (That's a photo of her and the Coop.)

But after Coop, the biggest love of her life was Bugsy Siegel, gangster, professional killer, the blue-eyed Lothario who had all the starlets swooning when his New York bosses sent him to Hollywood. Of course, he had a nice Jewish wife he kept tucked away in New Jersey with his two daughters, but, like the Countess, he didn’t let it cramp his style. Hearing that Chicago was going to muscle in on the Hollywood rackets, one more time, (a passel of them had just been thrown in the clink for doing same to the projectionist’s union) the mobsters in New York sent Siegel out to beat them to the punch. He’d grown up in Hell’s Kitchen with actor George Raft, who was mucho big at the time; Raft got him into the homes, and beds, of some of L.A.’s finest. Bugsy went totally Hollywood. In fact, he became so vain he was constantly applying cosmetics to his skin and his, he feared, thinning hair. Which didn’t, of course, mean that he ever went anywhere unarmed.

That’s because he was also a Grade A sociopath, one of the founders of Murder, Incorporated.


But la Countess thought she could make a gentlemen of Bugs. Unfortunately, traveling abroad (so to speak) and dating a countess hadn’t really broadened him much. In fact, he knew about as much about international relations as Warren Christopher. And so, he wasn’t really aware of the fact that the Axis powers, prodded by Germany, had declared war on “World Jewry.” The Japs, of course, had never even seen a Jew. The story is not apocryphal that, before the signing of the Tripartite Pact, the Japanese ambassador to Germany, after touring the new highways, weapons factories and buzzing nationalized industries that had bound the nation together once more in the health and joy of their shared Aryan heritage, commented, “Yes, it’s a wonderful system. But we don’t have any Jews.”

Juden Raus! The hot board game for Nazi kids in 1936. Really.

All of this is a little sad in and of itself, since Mussolini didn’t really go along for the ride on this one. In fact, most people don’t know that, in the beginning, it was Hitler who idolized Mussolini rather than the reverse, while as time passed, of course, Italy fell under Germany’s heavy-handed shadow. Of course Mussolini was a bully; his war of conquest in Ethiopia, airplanes and machine guns against spears, illustrated that full well. But despite his weaker military, Il Duce nevertheless had the balls, at first, to inform the world’s most murderous former house painter that Italy’s Jews were still Italians, and that he had no intention of turning them over to Herr Himmler. In his 18 previous years of iron rule, he’d never shown a whiff of anti-Semitism, and in fact, he made fun of Hitler’s Aryan obsession constantly. Of course, later, after relentless pressure from Berlin, he passed a pile of crap called the Manifesto of Race, stripping Italian Jews of their citizenship and barring them from government jobs. Italians were for the most part appalled. He often said later that he regretted having done it, and that race was a matter of “the heart,” rather than biology. Anti-Semitism as a national policy was never enforced much beyond this, the truth of which can be seen in the fact that there is no Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen in Tuscany. Would that Poland or the Ukraine could say the same.

Nevertheless, he was still Hitler’s closest ally and personal friend, and the countess was swelling up with “society circuit” pride that he was coming to the villa for dinner. Unfortunately, their other dinner guest that evening was that perennial Nazi favorite, Joseph Goebbels, come to soak up a little sun. So, as they were dressing for dinner, when the countess casually mentioned this little quirk of the Axis, Bugsy got very, very pissy. Already feeling she’d put her foot in her mouth, she realized she was going to get a boot up the arse if she didn’t explain it all to him.

At which point, true to his nickname, (totally bug nuts) Bugsy pulled out his favorite pocket .38 Special, waving it in the air, proclaiming that he was going to go downstairs and 'blow that goddamn Wop greaser’s brains out,' then take out the Kraut for good measure. Needless to say, this would have created something of a faux pas at the countess’ table. It took her a lot of diplomacy, and perhaps some quick intercourse, (Bugs was, as the French say, toujours prêt) to calm him down.

No question about it. Jew baiting makes for strange bedfellows.

Pauline Bonaparte & the Cult of Priapus

Or perhaps we should say le culte de priapisme, for I'm speaking of the remarkable and insatiable Pauline Bonaparte (1780 -1825), known today mostly for being Napoleon's sister, born, like him, to relative poverty as part of the very, very petty Corsican nobility. There were thirteen children in all, so it's probable that her formidable mother, Letizia, did a little penis worshipping herself. The family was only French by about a decade and a half, after France took Corsica as a colonial possession in 1768. But with Napoleon's meteoric rise, from victorious general to First Consul to emperor, Pauline followed, reveling in the life of luxury and privilege he showered on his favorite sister.

Unfortunately, she reveled in something else even more, this being her astonishing sexual appetite. She loved her brother, despite the fact that he bitched at her constantly and chose both her husbands; she hated the second one, a powerful Italian noble named the duc d'Borghese. She couldn't wait to get away from him and return to Paris. But it was while she lived with the duke in Rome, in 1804, that the great artist Canova did the sculpture above, called Venus Victrix, or Venus Victorious. A naked Pauline did the posing, which gave her stuffy brother fits.

Of course, the Lefevre painting to the left shows that she usually wasn't painted as a little shepherd girl, a la Marie Antoinette. Her face and form were legendary, and she kept her perfect complexion, all over, with a daily bath in 20 litres of milk mixed with warm water. She was always carried to the tub by one of her male servants; she had a real thing for being carried. Once, as a guest of her late husband's brother, she arrived, hauling her baggage and bathtub, and blithely requested her regular bath. He said he could provide the milk, but not the shower she liked afterwards. So she simply shrugged and had a hole knocked through the ceiling so the servants could pour the water over her. He said the place stank of rainwater and sour milk for weeks till he fixed it. But her regimen must have worked, since the men high and low lined up to be her lover. She rarely turned one away.

But they rarely lasted long. Pauline not only had an insatiable appetite, she also had an obsession with size over skill. Her physician, Dr. Peyre, was already telling her that her constant pelvic pain was due to sexual overindulgence. Unfortunately, he prescribed that she take the waters at a spa in Plombieres, and it was there, when she was supposed to be getting better, that she met Louis Phillippe, the Count de Forbin, who was apparently hung like an ox. She nailed him at once, took him home with her, made him her chamberlain, and was in constant need of his attention. Constant.

At last her pain became unbearable, and Peyre called in a famed gynacolagist and imperial physician, Dr. Halle. His diagnosis was pointed. The princess was suffering from what he called furor uterinus, an over-abused uterus and vaginal canal, which was a nice way of saying nymphomania. Apparently she was in agony, with pelvic pain, headaches and uterine spasms. In his reports to Dr. Peyre, Halle stated bluntly that she must be "saved" by being kept from the cause of the inflammation, a cause he knew full well but refused, for propriety's sake, to name.

Pauline's nickname, especially in England, was "Messalina", a rather cruel reference to the debauched and power-hungry wife of the Roman emperor Claudius. Well, maybe it was better than simply la puta, French for "the whore," although this appellation was generally reserved by the Bonaparte women for the Empress Josephine. Worse, especially in British political cartoons, she was graphically accused of having slept with her own brother, the emperor. If they can be believed in the back-stabbing atmosphere of the court, several people claimed that Josephine had told them of having caught them in the act, and in fact, Pauline never denied it.

Pauline would die a sad death at 45 of stomach cancer. But, despite her frivolity and grotesque spending habits, she was the only one of Napoleon's family who followed him into exile, even though he'd showered money and kingdoms on them all. And she had a sense of humor about her own debauched image. It often took dinner guests some time to realize that the gold cups they were drinking from, that looked so much like reproductions of ancient Roman cups, were, in fact, modeled on Pauline's breast. A glance at the cup compared to the statue above is all that's needed to prove this more than an historical myth.

Pauline, you really rocked!

A Marriage Proposal In Secret Code

This curious love letter is in the Library of Congress, and is written in a secret lover's code, undoubtedly to conceal its true meaning from the Lady's father. Read it through once, then go back and read every other line. (Click the image to make it a little clearer.)

Facts and Figures

The word “baroque” gets tossed around a lot, describing everything from a necklace to a symphony to a political speech, and so, often, its real meaning gets lost in the shuffle. If, indeed, it has one. Its label as an historical period in art and architecture isn’t so much in question; we’re talking roughly, very roughly, 1600 to the mid-and-late 1700's. In that sense, when you study it awhile, Baroque style becomes discernable with a modicum of confidence, though I wouldn’t say it too confidently when you’re touring the Louvre. You could choke your little self on a Rococo and look the fool, a thing Americans in Paris seem to fear more than death itself.

But when attempting to discern the actual definition, one is assaulted by a variety of complex and meaningless phrases that sound quite academic, but are in fact complete bullshit. Some refer to the Baroque obsession with rational philosophy and geometric grids, while others cite its adherence to emotionalism, metaphysical high drama and an adoration of the forces and free forms of nature, two ideas that would seem to cross one another out. God knows, anything that even smacks of the “science” of pure philosophy is worthy of contempt. Never have so many said so much to express so little. The word “baroque,” though not as bad as “phenomenological Neo-Hegelianism,” brings out this kind of nomenclature.

A good enough example - 17th and 18th century French gardens are often called Baroque style, and even our good friend Wikipedia, supposedly here to help us, lucidly explains that French Baroque gardening is inspired by both the Italian Renaissance and the works of the philosopher Descartes, “epitomizing monarch and man dominating and manipulating nature to show his authority, wealth and power . . .,” since “all movement is a straight line therefore space is a universal grid of mathematical coordinates and everything can be located on its infinitely extendable planes,” based upon the principles of Cartesian mathematics.

It really does make a person long for a couple of red geraniums in a plastic pot.

Rembrandt was one of the great Baroque painters, perhaps the father of the style, and he seemed to like his ladies chunky. In fact, he loved naturalism in his work, and could be downright ruthless about every physical imperfection; his self-portraits are anything but flattering, and though many of his commissioned portraits seem a bit kinder, others do not. In a few I’ve seen, if I’d paid the man to paint my portrait and then had him take such glee in highlighting every bag and sag, I’d have demanded my gilders back. But the simple fact that several of his most idealized works of great beauties of the past, from Bathsheba to Danaë, were modeled on his wife and, after her death, his live-in mistress, both of whom were quite hefty and clearly never refused a second helping of spekdikken, clearly shows that, for him at least, it only meant there was more of her to love. In fact, Rembrandt's Baroque "naturalism" gets taken to some really weird extremes. In the images below, he's sketched himself having a flurry with his wife, the beauteous Saskia, (how'd he hold the pencil?) in a sort of 17th century-version of dirty home videos, while in another fit of deviance the little perve drew her peeing in the back yard. How could you do that to your own wife? There is one artist, however, who unarguably epitomizes the Baroque style - the earthy Flemish painter Peter Paul (and Mary) Rubens. And so was born, for women everywhere, the adjectival phrase “Rubenesque” figure, a politically-correct synonym for those with the dimply thighs, turgid breasts and meaty backsides like carnival bunting that Rubens liked best. Of course, for feminists, Wiccans, sci-fi conventioneers and those who love fudge brownies, this has also come to imply that two centuries ago, men had far better taste in their ladies faire. And that, by extension, men these days have tried to box women into an idealized size and shape that is unattainable as well as unattractive. Of course, I love it in principle, but in reality I’m not sure it passes the historical smell test. A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman, whether stoutish or petite. There’s no question that slim wasn’t really in until the late 18th and very early 19th centuries, when idealized paintings of the great beauties of the day, from Emma Hamilton to Madame Tallien, dressed in their gauzy white empire gowns, glorified their far more elegant curves. They’re women who would knock any man’s eyes out walking along a beach in Cancun. Nevertheless, there are enough paintings of the Baroque period of lovely, curvaceous but still fairly slim ladies to put rout the notion that everybody wanted femme fatales with butt cheeks like two sofa cushions. Despite the erotica of the period often going into panting detail on men sinking their fingers into well-upholstered butts and buets, I think it’s a wishful misreading of the era as a whole for well-padded American ladies to suppose that the Baroque figure is something that had universal appeal. In other words, then as now, there is such a thing as chubby chasers. There were just probably a lot more of them. Exhibit A for the defense: The following was written in the late Baroque period in England by one Sydney Smith, who was a churchman and the canon of London’s treasure, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Professional churchmen were a lot different then. It was more a career choice than a divine revelation. Nevertheless, he also had a reputation as a rather liberal gentleman, who expected both the government and the people to occasionally live up to the principles of Christianity. Though largely forgotten now, he was considered to be the most savage wit of his day. His favorite targets were pomposity and stupidity, which means he shares a proud heritage with everyone from Mencken to Benchley to P.J. O’Rourke. But occasionally his gunsight strayed. Despite being a very well-upholstered specimen himself, he wrote the following on discovering that a friend of his was about to marry a widow twice his age, probably for the cash. One interesting historical side note on the last line - the term “reading someone the riot act” has a very real historical meaning. As a sop to the feelings of liberals, (called Whigs in those days) Britain passed a law in the 18th century that allowed free assembly, so long as everyone stayed calm. If they didn’t, the police were only allowed to bust heads and haul arses after they had read the “Riot Act,” officially announcing their intentions and giving the crowd a chance to just sober up and go home on its own. It rarely worked. In his missive Smith uses it to distinct humorous advantage. “Going to marry her! Going to marry her! Impossible! You mean, a part of her; he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy, but of trigamy; the neighborhood or the magistrates should interfere. There is enough of her to furnish wives for a whole parish. One man marry her! It is monstrous. You might people a colony with her; or give an assembly with her; or perhaps take your morning walks around her, always providing there were frequent resting places, and you are in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half-way and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her; in short, you might do anything with her but marry her.” De-formalize some of the language, and it could have been some politically incorrect dialog on Sienfeld. It does, however, lead one to the inevitable conclusion that, in any time or place, this “Rubenesque” thing can get carried too far. It is undeniable that, in ages past, skinny often meant unhealthy, perhaps tubercular and probably syphilitic. Only people with some flesh on them had a chance to fight off the ravages of the age like cholera and typhus. And, then as now, the “rosy glow of health” translated in the minds of many to “horny.” But gals, let’s face it; it doesn’t help an already avoirdupois situation to glance at your spreading backside in the mirror and shrug, “Well, in the old days the guys would have loved it.” There is, of course, another side to this, another line of common sense in the sand. I should like to see a new movement in this country for women to stop pretending that a size 2 is something to shoot for; it’s not even something you could shoot at. The average female in America is a size 14, a perfectly respectable size, perhaps a little hippish, depending on the frame of the woman wearing it. In the fifties and sixties, 12 was good, but the best was embodied by the phrase “a perfect 10,” which was considered quite svelte. Sizes haven’t changed - a trip to any vintage clothing store will prove that. But young women nowadays would never know this, since between the modeling-reality show piffle and ads for mega-corporations built on dieting they’ve been told a 2 or a 4 amounts to success. In the aforementioned ads, these five-foot-six women who’ve gotten down to 145 pounds are just plain lying about their new size - they couldn’t get a size 2 over their thigh, shapely as it now is. Truth to tell, when I’m assaulted by this crap, I’d love nothing better than to see some wisp of the “fat acceptance movement” gain a little footing, so that women can have a more realistic notion of what estrogen has done to them, and learn to love, or at least accept the consequences. But anyone who thinks the ideal will ever be someone who takes up two if not three airline seats is living in a baroque daze.

Today’s Profanity from the Past - "bung hole"

“Bum” has been a popular British term for the backside for centuries, and is still alive and well, while “bum fodder” has been slang for toilet paper (of some sort, anyway) since the mid-17th century. Unfortunately, “bung” or “bung hole” for the rectum, also of British origin, is a little less well-known, though still used occasionally in Britain. In America, it was most popular with seamen in the 18th century.

Usage Note: Reflecting on the skeleton of poor Yorick and on the meaning of existence (Hamlet did that a lot, to the point where you wanted to bitch-slap him) Hamlet said, “To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung hole?”

In other words, there’s no sense worrying about what will happen to you; in the end, we all wind up dumped on the universal dung heap, neither returning as prince nor frog, but merely as a dangler on the cosmic sphincter.

Stupidest name for a war contest: the War of Jenkins’ Ear

From 1799 to 1815, the publication for what was going on at sea was called the Naval Chronicle, printed in Great Britain. At the top of each issue was this succinct banner: “Britain rules the waves, and not another sail but by permission spreads.”

These guys did not have a problem with self-image.

However, despite the unarguable fact that Britain had the world’s greatest naval force, they still couldn’t be the world’s policeman. In the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, the world’s oceans were a dangerous place to be. Prize-taking was the order of the day, and oftentimes it was difficult to distinguish between a naval warship, a privateer, and a just-plain pirate. Wars broke out constantly, large and small; our “Quasi-War” for example, a little spat we had with France while John Adams was president, never officially declared a war, the result of French outrage over an American merchant treaty with Great Britain that Great Britain never honored anyway, thereby leading straight to the War of 1812.

The seas were in a constant state of turmoil. But it would be hard to find any conflict with a goofier name than the War of Jenkins’ Ear. No quasi-war this, it lasted years, from 1739 to 1748. Like so many naval wars of the period, it started out, finished with, and chiefly affected merchant shipping. A privateer was nothing more than an armed merchant ship with permission from its government, called a letter of marque, to harass and confiscate (steal) enemy merchant shipping. Get ‘em where they live, right in the pocketbook. The nations of Europe had staked out colonies all over the world, and as they did in the previous century over religion, they spent the next two centuries fighting over who got to keep the best real estate.

And who had the ear? Well, Robert Jenkins was a British merchant captain of the brig Rebecca who was cornered and boarded while in West Indian waters by a gang of Spanish seagoing thugs called the guarda-costa, charged with blockading the rich islands to keep anyone else from trading there. In a very un-British display of bad joss, the Spanish captain called Jenkins a pirate and cut off his ear, telling him he’d do the same to any other British captain near Spanish waters. Jenkins went back to report to Parliament. He took the ear with him. And so, of course, the British declared war on Spain.

Robert Jenkins showing his severed ear to British Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Ew.

Like so many other conflicts at sea of this period, one sort of melded into the next, in this case melting into the War of the Austrian Succession and from there to the Seven Year’s War, our French-and-Indian war. Bit of a mess, actually, and it bankrupted everyone all around. But of course, by the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21st, 1805, still Trafalgar Day even in politically correct Britain, the glorious Nelson would put both the Spanish and the French navy in their place, sweeping the seas for England.

As for Jenkins, he didn’t come out badly either, earless or not. He captained in the East India Company for a time, was governor of the island of St. Helena, and eventually retired and, like so many others long forgotten who’d had one whiff of fame, wrote a book, entitled Spanish Insolence Corrected by English Bravery. There’s a title that comes right to the point.

Still a really stupid name for a war, though.

To Snip, or Not To Snip. That Is The Question.

Riding the baloney pony: Roger Daltry is uncut in
Ken Russell's hallucinogenic movie, Lisztomania.

There’s been a bit of a politically correct brouhaha of late, over whether or not babies should be automatically circumcised. I don’t mean by machine, of course, but rather by their physicians soon after birth.

I swear to the Lord God of Hosts and all his Saints that I was already working on this piece for my blog when I heard something about it Sunday afternoon on NPR, that bastion of taxpayer “supported” entertainment. Just one of those things. I was on my way to Walgreens to pick up some refreshment in tablet form, when up popped the sensitive subject of circumcision.

They were interviewing some guy who was a pediatric bioethicist, whatever in the hell that means. (Does he get to decide whether or not it’s still ethical to give kids a lollipop after their inoculations? Do kids still get inoculations?) He was blathering on about a recent study on the decline in popularity of circumcision for newborns, based on some brand-new study that was probably done on the public nut (no pun intended). These things generally are. At any rate, the figures were worse than I thought. A decade ago, 56% of American babies were still being circumcised at birth; that figure has now dropped closer to one-third. He pointed out that this figure did not include infant circumcisions that are done as part of a religious ceremony, but since less than a pathetic 2.2 percent of our population is Jewish, and God only knows how many of them still adhere, that wouldn’t seem to affect the figures by much, although we do have a small but steadily rising population of Muslims, and they, too, circumcise.

He also pointed out that the huge numbers of Hispanics in America have also skewed these numbers, since they, in general, do not approve of such things. We Catholics, I can tell you right now, often have our little quirks. Everyone knows that, in the age of sail, men killed in battle were given burial at sea. But did you know that the Spanish navy never permitted this? Instead, the bodies were kept until they could be given a proper Catholic burial, based on the papal idea prevalent at that time that the Bible was absolutely literal, and that on Judgement Day all bodies who’d believed in Christ would rise from their graves, and so you’d better be in the best condition possible under the circumstances. It was only after Vatican II that other forms of burial, including, eventually, cremation, received the grudging blessing of the Church. Unfortunately, it could make for a rather malodorous situation onboard, and so bodies were often folded and put into cooper’s barrels filled with rum or some other sort of alcohol, then stored in the dunnage, bung up and bilge free, until they could reach port, as was done with the immortal Nelson.

But I digress.

This bioethisist was, in all fairness, speaking more for my side than for the opposition, for let me make this abundantly clear: I believe in circumcision. If you had to put the thing in your mouth, you’d believe in it, too. He pointed out the vastly lowered rate of urinary tract infections in children who had been circumcised, an illness that can be an annoyance for an adult, but deadly for a baby. Also, men who have been circumcised have a much lower rate of contracting AIDs and other STDs. He also pointed up the other advantages in overall cleanliness.

Cleanliness being the one I like. As I’ve stated many times, even in this freewheeling forum, there are certain phrases that are difficult for me to utter and or write. I have gotten better. At sixteen, I still referred to my own genitalia as “down there,” as if it nested somewhere in Alabama. Nevertheless, the phrase I once heard my Christopher use (only once), back in high school when we were dating, still gives me a shudder of repulsed nausea - “dick cheese.” This is apparently the locker-room term for the nearly inevitable build-up of seepage gunk within the folds of the uncircumcised member, teeming with viral cultures so similar to the natural process that creates yogurt and cheese. I couldn’t look a piece of gouda in the face for months.

Then, after cleanliness, came the inevitable discussion of the opposition. I’d known already that this was, as with everything else these days, a touchy and politically correct issue, and far be it from me to say that they have no points on their side. Nowadays, like whole grain foods (a cultural gift of Euell Gibbons - “Did you ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible!”) along with yogurt, tofu and so much else of the currency of our Brave New World, many folks decided that if it came in that package, it should remain in that package. After all, isn’t what’s natural always better than what’s imposed by the mischievous mind of man?

Look, I love whole grains, and organic vegetables, and I’m even learning to like yogurt. But I would ask said purveyor of noble savagery to remember that hair lips, club feet and platycephalic heads all arrive COD from Mother Nature, as well.

But I must admit that when this bioethicist spoke of the opposition, some of whom call themselves “intactivists,” and who refer to the ancient practice of circumcision as “genital mutilation,” I began to get really steamed. Once I was done laughing, of course. Such are the PI’s, the Perennially Indignant, a phrase coined by the immortal P.J. O’Rourke.

But for God’s sake, “intactivists?” “Genital mutilation?” This is the sort of overheated rhetoric one reserves for fighting an oppressive regime roughly the size and scope of Stalinist Russia, not a simple practice that is forced upon no one, with each and every free citizen allowed to make up his own mind. Or his kid’s mind, anyway.

It’s a language, and a pose, that I abhor. Does anyone remember when the Susan G. Komen mega-foundation was just getting started? This was before everything from your undies to your Saran Wrap looked like Pepto Bismal, and Kay Thompson belting out “Think Pink!” in Funny Face is constantly keening in your ear. They were doing some sort of run for the cure, and Miss America was participating. As beauty contestants often do, she felt it incumbent upon her to say something both rousing and intelligent when a microphone got shoved into her mug. Like walking and chewing gum at the same time. And so, out of her over-painted puss pops this gem: “You know, if men could get cancer in their sexual parts, they’d have found a cure for it by now.”

Okay, laugh if you will, but I’m telling you, this kind of thinking is poisonous. It enobles the trivial and deflates the vital. “Genital mutilation?” Ladies and gents, if you want to talk genital mutilation, let’s discuss the practice of forced female “circumcision” in Islamic countries, even the relatively civilized ones like Egypt, where about 85% of the women living in the countryside still have this done, or should I say done to them. The operation has nothing whatsoever in common with circumcision. These young girls are held down, often by female relations, and their clitoris is removed. Later deaths from infection are appallingly common. Let’s make this abundantly clear to those unaquainted with medical euphemism. It would be exactly the same thing as taking a knife and cutting a man’s dick off. Sorry, there’s just no more delicate way to put it. As with so much else, the Islamic hordes who’ve moved into Western Europe have brought this charming practice with them. And the stone-cold silence on this subject from American feminists is just plain maddening. They’re too busy excoriating American men for not having coughed up a cure for breast cancer yet.

Of course, there is another way this can be handled, so to speak, avoiding all this contentiousness altogether. Parents can wait, and allow their son to make up his own mind, when he’s older. But I think this one has its own baggage.

Once, when we were in Turkey, we saw a young boy dressed in quite an outfit, as if he were about to be presented to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. We found out that the celebration was something akin to a Jewish bar mitzvah, but in this case, the circumcision is done on the boy then, that very day, before he gets his Cross pen.

Yes, it was a glorious party. But the look on that poor kid’s face will stay with me, always. If you can get this thing over with as quickly as possible, before he even has time to know what’s happening or be haunted by images of what’s coming, I think you’re doing your kid a big favor.

"Let me get this straight.

You want us to cut the ends of our dicks off?"

What amazes me is how far back this delicate operation goes. It’s like eating eggs that you found underneath a chicken’s ass; who had the nerve to do it first? I took Jewish Studies in college, and once, going over a book about the archeological digs in Masada in Israel, I came across a photo of an ancient set of bris tools dating from the period. They were nothing more than crudely sharpened stones. Any woman who’s ever even changed a baby, seeing that teeny, tiny little dingle of theirs, will have a fainting spell at the thought of anybody going after the thing with these. Still, it must have worked, somehow.

And throughout the Middle Ages and early modern history in the West, it remained principally a Jewish practice. During World War II, when Nazi thugs found a kid in the street without his papers, they often yanked his pants down to see if he was circumcised before hauling him off to the nearest ghetto or cattle car. Apart from the horrors of war and the brutality of the Nazis, neither being exactly fresh news, these stories illustrate all too clearly that as late as the 1940's, it was still only Jewish children being routinely circumcised.

But many cultures have practiced circumcision, all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, including devout Muslims. In America, circumcision of newborns on a routine basis began about the late 1950's and on into the 1970's, based on studies of the time, before some people began to object. Nowadays, doctors present the pros and cons, and allow parents to decide.

The most blood-curdling arguments put forward by those opposing circumcision often fall into the billion-to-one category, though they are unarguably true. There was a notorious one from the 1960's of a slip of the incompetent surgeon’s knife, and his decision to go all the way and perform a sex change on the child. He ordered the parents to raise the boy as a girl in every way, blithely assuring them there would be no problems. There were, in fact, major problems, that led to the kid getting his three-piece set back in adulthood. As best he could, anyway.

Uncircumcised men like to claim that their “head”, if you will, is more sensitive, and that therefore they enjoy lovemaking more. One of my friends even said that he found the very idea of an uncircumcised, unprotected penis being slung against loose change, Chapstick and car keys in a man’s pocket to be horrifying, as if a foreskin were similar in nature to an aluminum bottle cap. He claimed, as well, that this “protection” had made his member more “sensitive.”

Tough to prove, of course. I must admit, all these claims of additional sensitivity sound a lot to me like the claims on late night TV about certain all-natural “male enhancement” products. They send you nothing more in its essentials than herbs and vitamins that could be argued to improve general circulation, and in return they harvest your credit card number, which you will regret unto the seventh son of the seventh son. In the 1950's, at least they had a sense of humor about it; teenagers promised an eleven-inch penis by ads in the back of sleazy mags ended up getting a foot-long dildo in the mail. But sensitivity (of both kinds) has certainly never been a problem with my Christopher, who’s been peeled since birth, nor have I ever heard or read of any other circumcised male complaining of it. If I ever do, perhaps I’ll give the claim more credence. Until then, I think it’s a lot of mahaha.

My problem that started me on this quest, as with so many of my problems, was a bit stranger. It occurred when I had to write my first 19th century love scene. Journals, diaries and period erotica had convinced me that, though the minutia of arrival in the bedroom was very different, the mechanics of the thing were the same. But I did have one small problem. Being a happily married lady who’d never taken a walkabout, I hadn’t the first clue what an uncircumcised penis looked like.

So, as with all else, I began pawing through my massive research library. According to our movers, we own over five tons of books. (Hey, lady, do me a favor and give someone else the job next time, okay?) And we’ve acquired six more full bookcases since then, making a total of 23. But, for the first time, my own little Library of Congress let me down. I could find nothing.

I peered at Michelangelo’s David until my eyes were sore, but I just couldn’t make out anything concrete, pardon the pun. But paintings, drawings and my Christopher’s assurances convinced me that, in an erect state, there wasn’t much difference, so I went ahead and wrote the scene. Yet, like all true research hounds, the not knowing bugged the hell out of me.

At last, as with so many other queer questions, it was Wikipedia that came to the rescue, and I finally encountered my first photograph of an uncircumcised male member in its natural, unagitated state.

I was horrified. I’d expected to see more, not less. To my untrained eye, it looked like Joan Crawford had taken a hatchet to it in some bilious and bloody William Castle flick from 1960. The top was like the shriveled, withered, dimpled remains of an arm taken off at the elbow.

No wonder, I found myself reflecting with a shudder, that so many guys get all hung up on the power of the little blue pill. In its state of homo erectus, a man possesses a wonder of nature, no less than the mighty oak or the rolling river. In a flaccid state, he looks like a pathetic photo of a World War I amputee.

However, in the final analysis, to snip or not to snip is a manly decision, one in which the distaff side really shouldn’t, I suppose, take part, except in the most general terms. But then again, perhaps this, too, is unfair, for in my next posting I’ll relate how this little flap of genital tissue has altered the course of history in no less than an earthshattering fashion on several occasions.

In the meanwhile, I’ve no doubt the battle will rage on. Just remember one thing; it’s tough to sew it back on again, so whatever your choice, let it be a happy one.

---

And speaking of circumcision, it’s amazing how many times this little piece of genital tissue has had such a momentous impact on history.

Pink Poodles & French Pornography

The erotic painting at left is the work of François Boucher (1703-1770). He was not a pornographer, though he did love painting nudes, particularly with a Grecian theme. He was, in fact, an important artist of the period, First Painter to the French Court. But of course, like all artists, (Michelangelo once said “We’re all whores,”) he knew which side his bread was buttered on. And so, he produced the work as part of a whole packet of drawings on the subject of sex to be handed over to the dauphin of France (akin to the Prince of Wales in Britain). They were called grivoiseries, meaning saucy or bawdy stories. They were intended to provide the boy with a graphic representation of what his grandfather, Louis XV, had spent most of his reign doing, to his mistresses, as well as the French people.

But these Rococo didactics went out to the future Louis XVI, so, all in all, it was a bit of a wasted effort.


Back in the day, before the invention of hygiene classes, no one had to be more certain than a king that his son and heir had absorbed the Facts of Life; the fate of the nation literally hung in the balance. (NPI) There were two common routes to this enlightenment, apart from a trip out to watch the animals in the barnyard. One was to provide a set of provocative drawings, such as those above, an 18th century version of Playboy; the other was to hand over the royal mistress for a night or two. Sometimes both.

But Louis was a sensitive boy, embarrassed by the whole subject. In fact, seen in the light of his little problem, the Boucher paintings could probably qualify with Amnesty International as a form of torture. That’s because they were a flop for a far more down to earth reason than sexual embarrassment. Louis had a problem, that seemed to relate more to fear his of his physicians (justifiable in those days) than any latent fear of sexual inadequacy.

The whole damn mess that would lead to the guillotine started with a part Joan “Don’t fuck with me, fellows” Crawford was born to play, with a little fatty padding, this being the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa. On the Continent, away from sensible England, there was a really dumb but almost universally accepted dictate called Salic law, meaning that a woman could not inherit the throne. Primogeniture, the feudal idea of the oldest son getting everything and the others being packed off with an allowance to lead wasted lives, extended to the highest in the land. But sometimes ladies got round this, and Maria Theresa, for reasons too complex to go into here, was one of these iron-skirted “Ma Barkers” of history. Despite being married, despite the fact that after her husband’s death she produced not one but two emperors (Joseph, followed upon his death by his brother Leopold), she wore the pants in the family at all times. She had produced for her husband the Emperor Francis I something like 37 children. (I’m kidding. It was only 30.) Consequently, she didn’t think reeling out heirs was much of a task, since she went right on governing the country afterwards like a pioneer wife hanging out laundry, while her husband courted opera singers, went to lodge meetings, and generally frittered. But she didn’t even remotely consider the possibility that it might be more difficult for somebody else, including her own youngest daughter, Maria Antonia Josepha.

The French and the West End Austrians had been bitter enemies for centuries, an enmity that would survive the many name changes and real estate shifts brought about by lots of small wars and two World Wars, still alive and kicking, into the 20th century. After all, let’s face it - every time Germans got bored they invaded France.

Consequently, it was quite a diplomatic coup that, of all the high-powered alliances she arranged for her massive brood, the most impressive was the marriage of her fourteen-year-old daughter, now re-christened Marie-Antoinette, to the dauphin of France, Louis-Auguste, who was an equally-green fifteen.

At first, the two kept a pretty low profile, because the king, Louis XV, was a terrifying character with little love for his grandson, and the most favored out of his virtual stable of whores, Madame du Barry, called the shots socially at court. Everyone cut the young couple some slack at first, simply for being so young. But when seven long years passed, and they were still childless, the situation was growing dangerous. The people hated the Austrians as passionately as ever, and Marie-Antoinette’s devil-may-care behavior, probably born out of despair as much as anything else, wasn’t helping matters. Louis XV was old and sick, as well as temperamental, and there was talk of sending the Austrian baggage home, so that someone could be found to do the job. The formidable Maria-Theresa was completely exasperated, and laid all the blame at her daughter’s doorstep. At last, she sent her eldest son Joseph to Paris to find out what in hölle was going on.

As was so often the case, the old bag had misjudged the situation completely, clever as she could be. The problem was not a recalcitrant princess, but rather a useless prince. Louis was lonely at court and isolated from his family, what was left of it. He’d never been born to rule - he was a third son of the dauphin. But a parade of death, culminating in the death of his father of tuberculosis when he was eleven, his mother following soon after, left him a lonely and confused heir to the throne. After seven years of virgin marriage, he must have been by that point pretty humiliated, and must, as well, have wanted to confide in someone. Joseph seemed safe, as well as sympathetic; he wouldn’t be hanging around the French court to compose limericks that would humiliate the young dauphin even further. And so, Louis confided his little problem to his brother-in-law.

It’s called phimosis, a somewhat bizarre condition in which the foreskin has somehow gotten deformed, tightly twisted, looking like nothing so much as the first twist in a clown’s balloon sculpture of a French poodle. It’s a sort of Peter Pan thing, because according to scientists, all babies in the womb, and many infants and little boys, have a “non-retractable” foreskin, or what is essentially a similar state of affairs. But phimosis in adulthood is a painful condition, the worst part being that any sexual arousal was agony for him. He was just too tightly wrapped to be able to rise to the occasion, and so had to take an immediate cold shower.

Of course, the royal physicians, incompetent as they could be, were familiar with the condition, and had already explained to Louis, on several occasions, what had to be done. Then, as now, the principal effective treatment for this condition is essentially circumcision, freeing the penis from the choke-hold of the deformed foreskin. They also explained that, as operations go, this one was relatively simple. But Louis had stood by and watched these gentlemen help kill a half-dozen members of his family with their incompetence; they bled people for everything from head colds to the pox, usually hastening death in the process. However, and most men would probably understand this, his fear was really deeper, almost primal; he wasn’t going to let these guys come at the family jewels with a sharp knife.

But when Joseph discovered there was a simple answer to this dilemma, he exploded, becoming the father figure Louis had never had. The dauphin got himself a thorough wigging - if Jewish babies could endure this operation, so, surely, could the future king of France. It was the boot up the bum he needed.

The operation was a complete success, and a year later Marie-Antoinette delivered up her first child, though the court was disappointed that it was a daughter, a child that she wanted even if nobody else did. But once the factory got jump-started, it continued unabated, delivering up two sons and another daughter. One son and one daughter would die in childhood of tuberculosis at the hands of the aforementioned royal physicians, but the fact remained that she’d done her duty by God and country, and received the grumbling approval of the nation.

Unfortunately, that seven-year period of childlessness had started a downward spiral, in terms of the intellectuals and radicals of the day feeling it was all right to despise her. And despise her they did, in print, without respite. It was like poor Gerald Ford; you trip once on an icy airline stairway, and suddenly you’re a lackwitted stumblebum, with a salacious press waiting in the wings like hungry wolves for anything they could use against you, in order to burn that image into the national consciousness. Yes, for many years Marie-Antoinette was a spendthrift and a flake, but once she had kids she settled down. And poor befuddled Louis was at heart a liberal and a reformer, with great plans for calling together France’s first National Assembly in nearly two centuries to implement them. But both of them never got any respect. Whatever they did was wrong. It is arguable that this long period of disrespect and ridicule, along with a dozen other factors, fed the national hate-fest that would end so tragically for the entire royal family.

Louis XVI might have feared his doctors, but he went bravely to the guillotine on January 21st, 1793. The pathetic Marie-Antoinette, accused of every foul crime imaginable including incest with her own son, followed just as bravely nine months later. The only survivor of the Terror in the immediate family was their daughter, Marie Thèrése, with the honorific title Madame Royale, as the first daughter of the King. Of course, she was at that time referred to as simply Marie Capet, daughter of the Austrian Bitch.

She was left to rot in the grim Conciergerie prison, alone, since even her Aunt Elizabeth, Louis’ sister, had been taken from her to be guillotined a few days after the Queen. Like her mother, she had nothing but rags to wear, and no fire in her ice-cold cell, nor even a candle at night. She knew her father was dead, but no kind soul ever bothered to inform her of the death of her mother and aunt. There is still a message from her scratched in the walls of her cell, the gut-wrenching misery of a frightened sixteen-year-old girl, praying that her mother still lived. Her brother, the dauphin Louis, after horrific treatment at the hands of his captors that included virtual brainwashing against his parents, died under mysterious circumstances that DNA is only now unraveling, in a terrific book by Deborah Cadbury called The Lost King of France.

As for Marie Thèrése, after Robespierre went, not so bravely, to the guillotine in the Great Terror of 1794, she was released to her Austrian relations. She wandered the world from relative to relative, like so many who were dispossessed royalty, until she married her cousin Louis, (imaginative with names, weren’t they?) the son of her father’s youngest brother. During the Bourbon restoration after the fall of Napoleon, she eventually became the daupine of France. Yet her lousy luck ran true to form. After the Revolution of July 1830, her father-in-law abdicated, but for a brief time, her husband, who was at that moment legally Louis XIX, refused to sign his own abdication. She has since gone down in history as the woman who was Queen of France for twenty minutes. RIP

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. . . .

You don’t hear much about good old-fashioned bestiality anymore. Mostly, it’s just a bad gag with a worse punch line - “With all a’ them sheep, you had’ta go an’ pick the sheriff’s girl.” Sex within species is pretty much available to all these days, and if someone goes for a pig instead, it’s because he’s one twisted mother. But in Days of Olde, when people on farms lived a much more isolated existence, it was a bit more common. Still a weapons-grade perversion, of course. After all, for the sake of cleanliness alone, it’s hard to imagine how the bung hole of a cow could ever look good. Just about anything would seem more sanitary, including the palm of your right hand. In his rollicking diaries, Boswell admits that, as a young man, he preferred hugging oak trees, imagining they were gnarly whores and finding relief from the desires that, his later life shows all too clearly, plagued him constantly. Well, at least it’s cleaner. But look out for that poison ivy.

Of course, if he’d stuck to following Dr. Johnson around and screwing oak trees, he probably wouldn’t have had to write Boswell’s Clap and Other Essays, detailing his persistent battles with gonorrhea.

Yet, for the historian, it’s interesting to note the moment in history when the fire and brimstone of American Puritans met the dying days of bestiality, and it’s really, really hard not to laugh, despite the fact that the confessed practitioner of same was summarily hanged. The part that’s so hysterical is the fact that, once the poor bastard had confessed, before he was hanged he had to take the whole kit and kaboodle of judges and church deacons down to the old homestead to tell them which of the animals there he’d had “unnatural congress” with. Can you even picture it? “Well, Daisy’s been my favorite since she was born. I love her curly hair.” Then poor Daisy, as well, faced the hangman’s noose.

Actually, despite their well-deserved reputation for stern punishment, so much so that, even in the mid-1600's, guys who’d come with them (pardon the pun) were leaving to start their own, less oppressive settlements, the Puritan fathers weren’t doing this to punish the animals. They were doing it because of their lack of any real understanding of the process of procreation. Their biggest fear was that it might be possible for the man to have impregnated a cow or a pig. And then what? What sort of unholy monster might result from that? So, with visions of It’s Alive (“Another one’s been born in Seattle”) dancing in their heads, they had the animals hanged, too. They were not slaughtered; no one was allowed to eat them. They were quietly buried in a secret place, before the lonely goatherd went to meet his Maker.

RIP

Try to Remember

In all of this recent brouhaha over the so-called "Ground-Zero Mosque," I heard some guy ask, "Okay, it's hollowed ground, but just when does the grieving stop?"

Never, sir, for an historian. Historians go to Gettysburg, stand over the mass graves there marked only by regiment, unspool the Gettysburg Address or the poetry of Emily Dickenson in their heads, (Ample make this bed/Make this bed with awe/In it wait till judgement break/Excellent and fair) and then cry like babies.

The passage of time does not make an injustice magically just, nor does it make suffering any the less tragic, or heroic. In the last great Jewish revolt of the 2nd century, Rabbi Akiba was skinned alive by the Romans, slowly, spouting Torah the whole time. I still shiver to think of it. No longer a teen-ager, I can watch the end of Spartacus with dry eyes, but I can't think of Daniel Pearl without weeping. If you're waiting for me to get over the image of Americans crossing themselves and then jumping off the 104th floor to keep from being burned alive, I'm afraid you've got a very, very long wait.

If your name were Ufuk Ince, wouldn’t you change it to John Krapp-House Dore?

English is a remarkable language. I’m proud to call it mine own. I’ve studied and loved many tongues, but for my money, none can touch the sheer joy of English. It’s so filled with idiom and rule-breaking grammar that it’s very difficult for foreigners to learn; French is a cake walk in comparison. Personally, I think only Mandarin Chinese is harder. That’s due to its diverse sources, for it is not merely a Romance language built upon Latin, as are French and Spanish. Born and bred in Britain, it began with the Sanskrit Indo-European language of the island’s Celts, then absorbed Latin from its Roman conquerors, (as well as from later Church Latin). Next came the waves of Germanic and semi-Germanic invaders, the Angles, the Jutes, the Old Norse, the Frisians, the Saxons, all from that same vast area of the Netherlands and its off-islands, Denmark, Germany, Jutland, etc. Finally came the last major conqueror, the Norman French, who tried to ban the Anglo-Saxon tongue altogether and failed, nevertheless leaving their Romance-language mark.

Accordingly, English is considered to be the largest language in the world, with over 500,000 words, and this exclusive of 20th century scientific and technical terms.

Being a complete nutcase on the age of sail, (which makes sense for a pudgy and pasty native of a landlocked state) I’ve always been a fan of Joseph Conrad. I read my first one, Lord Jim, at the age of fourteen. (And the film version with Peter O’Toole is a pip.) Conrad’s works, from novels like Nostromo to short stories and novellas like Heart of Darkness, upon which Coppola based the film Apocalypse Now, are all priceless treasures of our linguistic heritage. Along with using the sea so effectively as a psychological metaphor, his works were known above all for the beauty of their language.

But there was much I never knew about the man himself until many years later. I always loved telling this story to adult students struggling with English. Joseph Conrad was, in fact, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland in 1857. As a child, his father was sent into exile in Siberia for his political views, so as a boy must have picked up a little Russian. But in truth he only spoke Polish, and later French, which he learned as a young man when he went to school in Switzerland, and then to sea from the port of Marseilles. He read the great works of fiction in these two languages. At the age of 21 he skipped out of the French merchant marine and into the British one, at which time he had only a few words of English. He served in the British merchant marine for another 16 years, where he slowly picked up the language, not as a scholar, but as a seaman. He became a British subject in 1886. His experiences sailing in Indonesia and the Congo would color all of his work. But the astonishing thing is that he didn’t publish his first stories until the age of 37 - in English. None of these books were translations from his native Polish, or French. Conrad wrote in the language he learned last, and last of all. So much for old dogs and new tricks. He always said that he loved English for its myriad subtleties, for the fact that there were more ways to say the same thing in English than in any other language.

How right he was. An English thesaurus is three times as long as a French one. There are more ways to express the same idea in English than in any other language I know. And, even better for a writer, these various words often have oh-so-subtle differences in meaning. You can hate a guy. But you can also despise him, detest him, abhor him, loathe him and abominate him, as well as holding him in contempt, finding him odious, or bearing him a grudge. Not to mention the fact that he just plain pisses you off. And this only scratches the surface of how revolting, galling, irksome, obnoxious, despicable, repugnant, base and ignoble you find him.

Sorry. Started to sound like a politician there for a minute.

The symphonic tones of English run the gamut from the explosive 1812 Overture to the delicate minor keys of Chopin, from the lyrical beauty of Emily Dickenson, (Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me / The carriage held but just ourselves, and immortality) to the talkover excitement of a battlefield scene in an MGM war picture or the rat-a-tat dialog of an early thirties talkie: Nothing matches the elasticity, the vibrancy, and the sheer sensuous pleasure of English.

So why is that, of all the bounty to be had from this tongue of poets and kings, the word that will be written across our tombstone ten thousand years hence is, without doubt, “Fuck?”

Of course, it would be hard to overstate the impact of English all over the world, far and above the influence of any single word - it is definitely our lingua franca, the world’s common tongue, a term that dates to the old days of the Mediterranean sea trade, when the seamen came up with a patois of their own that included elements of Spanish, Arabic, Italian, French, etc., so these traders could understand one another. It is now English that is spoken all over the world. Though I’ve become convinced that the “ugly American” tourist is pretty much of a myth (we tip big, we’re polite as hell, and we take a lot of crap), the fact is that one of their legendary statements, along with “That American green’ll spend anywhere!” is quite true - “They all speak English, you know, even if they pretend they don’t.”

We’re lucky, and we’ve traveled a great deal. I’d heard English the world over, but I think it was when I was in China that I really began to see the impact of it all. As in India, there are literally dozens of dialects there, and, as in India, they can’t always understand one another. This is why the nation of India had the good sense to make English their official language of government, while still working to protect every native dialect. In China, we learned a set of hand gestures in order to shop the bazaars and the hysterically misnamed Friendship Store, a department store for foreigners mainly to buy cheap silk pajamas. These hand gestures are the ones they use with one another when there’s a dialectic wall of stone between them.

But, in a nation cut off from the West for so many years, what surprised me most was the number of Chinese people I heard speaking English to one another. For two Chinese guys from different regions, English, even broken English, was often the only common language they shared.

And the fact is, the English foreigners speak better than any other, apart, perhaps, from “Are you ready to order,” is English profanity. As it rises over the traffic noise of Paris or floats above the cheering masses of soccer fans in Istanbul, the single word or’whelms all others, a constant reminder of America’s international impact: Fuck you, fuck all (a newer British noun; Brits love turning verbs into nouns, and vice-versa - have a “lie-down,” or, “Speak up! I’m Hoovering!”), fuck this and that and the other, and by the way, fuck off. Unbelievable.

In the Latin, sex was either concubitus or coitus, both of which survive only in scholarly or medical phrases. “Fuck” has a far earthier paternity.

According to my most treasured possession, the entire twenty-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary (Praised Be Its Name), “fuck,” often spelled “fucke,” goes back in printed form to at least the 16th century. It is doubtless far older. And the OED (Praised Be Its Name) points out its usage in various classic works, from Burns to Lawrence.

According to another favorite source, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by an antiquarian named Captain Francis Grose, who wrote it to make the unintelligible cant slang and profanity of the London streets understandable to the educated who were being vilified without realizing it. (Though he, of course, cautions them not to actually use it.) Originally published in 1785, with several new editions and copious notes in modern editions by Eric Partridge, it speaks of the word’s many 15th century companions, including the very Shakespearean “swive,” then mentions a possible Latin root in futuere, or the Greek phuteuo, neither of which are in my squeaky clean dictionaries, as well as the gentle French root foutre. Another dictionary describes the Roman root as “psuedo-Latin,” whatever that is, probably slang, the word being fuccant. But I think he really gets to the point when Partridge mentions briefly a Teutonic root for the central consonant “c”.

And the Oxford English Dictionary (PBIN) gets there eventually as well, mentioning briefly the Germanic root word fuken.

Here, I think, the scholars have hit the mark, though they may have missed its import. I’m no fan of German, but I believe it was the addition of that jarring consonant at the center that turned the word from one of many to a stand-alone classic. It’s the onomatopoeic aspect of the thing, the simple impact of its sound as it falls upon the recipient’s ear. I suppose it’s that touch of German in our glorious tongue that gives the word that harsh and discordant flair. I must admit, as much as I love French, my Christopher is right - when your house is burning down, it just doesn’t have the same impact to be mincing around shouting, “Feu! Feu!”

“Fuck” also has an astonishing, nay an endless number of variants. I think that most people, no matter how potty-mouthed, have a particular vulgarity they hate. For me, it’s the disgustingly Oedipal M-F word, the coarse hyphenate every rapper loves even more than Keats loved his Grecian urn. I shall not sully my electronic pen to repeat it even here in this free-wheeling gallery of the fun and profane, for I will play no part in giving it any legitimacy, nor will I provide it an audience.

This does not mean, however, that I have no romance with profanity, in all languages. Our swear words tell us as much about ourselves as do our art museums and our bathrooms. Or, as a proud British bellboy, showing me the power of the flush and the showerhead in our hotel room once said, “Great, isn’t it? I know how you Yanks love your plumbing.”

Us Yanks love our swear words, as well. Perhaps a tad too much, truth to tell. The film 48 Hours with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy was a wake-up call for me. It came out while I was in film school. My mother had already taken note of the fact that hanging out with film students all the time had not improved my vocabulary. I was swearing more than I ever had in my life in those days, a habit I have since curbed. It’s like not turning up the radio when your hands are wet. You do things for your mother.

At any rate, in my opinion, the movie 48 Hours was a turning point in American film culture, such as it is. I never missed a movie in those halcyon days, and cinema by that time was pretty raw. Yet, even as I worked on film sets and cussed like a sweaty stevedore, 48 Hours got under my skin. It seemed more than merely profane; it was almost like a physical assault. There were times I wanted to get up and leave the theatre; my eardrums could simply stand no more.

In those pre-Internet days, we used to go to the American Film Institute Library in order to read the great scripts and study them.

As we left 48 Hours, I glanced at Chris and said, “Wouldn’t you love to see the screenplay? Maybe we could find some of the dialog.”

Of course, 48 Hours has since been left in the dust by film after film that used profanity as a substitute for imagination. Now, it seems almost quaint. Although it is even more comical to see a channel that edits for language trying to run the thing; there are so many bleeps it sounds like a car alarm going off in the parking lot. It reminds me of ABC’s infamous airing of its fifty-seven minute version of Midnight Cowboy. I never even got the fact that Jon Voight was a male prostitute.

And though we’ve both noticed a fresh new trend in a lot of American films, this being a bit of talent in the screenplay, the fact remains that, all in all, American movies that aren’t period pieces are just drowning in profanity, until you tune it out, you just don’t hear it anymore. Well, I still hear it, but I’m from out of the Stone Age.

And yet, I repeat, I’m not especially anti-profanity. When I’m tutoring a kid, I tell him he can use any profanity he wants. So long as he is able to give me the complete derivation of the word, including its original tongue and its complete conjugation, as well as noting the Latin or Greek derivatives. It seems to be a worse punishment than the paddle.

In Monty Python's The Life of Brian, I am reminded of one scene in particular. All the Jewish freedom fighters are saying "What have the Romans ever done for us?" Unfortunately, they slowly start raising their hands and mentioning things. By the end, an exasperated John Cleese shouts, "All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? "

I always think of that scene whenever someone accuses America of being “imperialist.” We’ve given the world all of the above and more, collecting no tax from them as the Romans did, and by the way not crucifying them. The fact that people from Kiev to Marseilles love Levis jeans and Coca Cola does NOT make us an imperialist nation, except, perhaps, a passive one. We’ve given people all over the world clean water, food in famines, new methods of agriculture, AIDS-fighting programs that have saved untold millions of lives, troops to drive out the Hun, and just plain handouts and goodies galore.

Yet, it seems that, in the historical sense, the most universal thing we’ve given the world as a whole is the word “fuck.”

As with the remains of the Roman empire to be found in the ruins of Epheasus or Bath, when archeologists dig up what’s left of our American empire, they will doubtless note the well-worn path of this single epithet. In moments of rage or frustration, I have heard it issuing forth, virtually free of an accent, from the lips of Egyptian hack drivers, Greek waiters, Turkish policemen, Provencal waiters, Venetian gondoliers, Chinese bureaucrats, British mystery writers, Arab souk proprietors, Mexican pilots and Italian grand prix drivers. (Or cab drivers; in Italy, it’s hard to tell the difference.) They use it in all of its variants and tenses, as noun, verb and adjective, in both the active and the passive voice, as well as the imperative “fuck off.” You hear it a lot in Paris; the French version, foutre, just doesn’t seem to carry the same weight. You still hear it, but they seem to be pretty much abandoning it, as we’ve abandoned “Gee, whiz.”

What is it about the sound of the word, what is it about the look of it scrawled across a bathroom wall, what is it about the mystical, emphatic one-note impact of it, that has made it so cherished the world over, deathless even in an age of incessant and constantly shifting vulgarity?

My mother used to say that swearing is a sign of ignorance of a broader vocabulary. Though she was, of course, always right, in this one little thing I’m not certain I completely agree. No matter how eloquent the speaker, there are some check-bouncing, meat loaf-burning, finger-caught-in-the-car-door moments in life for which the eruption of “Fuck!” is the only word in the English language that can truly express the furious knot of rage in the stomach. And I use the word “express” as a verb here in both its meanings, for it almost seems to help rid your body of the tension of your fury, like a miniature exorcism, as if some of the frustration within is expelled in a “whoof” of sharply-consonanted air.

But be they physical or emotional, whatever its charms to those of every class, race and level of IQ, the word isn’t going anywhere. In a recent column by one of my favorite brainiacs, John Derbyshire, he told of the corps of Russian sleeper agents in America finally caught by authorities, and of the various Americanized monikers they were hiding behind. He then mentions the fact that the only bizarre name in the whole bunch belonged to a finance professor at the University of Washington commenting on the story who had taught many of them in his class, this being one Ufuk Ince.

The word simply will not lose its ability to entertain. Thank God I was home in my comfy chair, where I could laugh all I wanted, as I was inevitably reminded of a party I attended a few years ago, when an affable gentleman stuck out his hand to me with a beaming smile and chirped, “Hi! I’m Dick Bender!” I finally had to slink off to the Ladies Loo in order to get it out of my system before I could face him again. It was still tough. Wouldn’t you just call yourself Richard?

BTW, if you want to see a film that expresses the incessant ebb and flow of ever-changing slang, over 48 Hours I'd recommend Ball of Fire, from 1942. Despite the millions of women who swooned at the mere mention of Gary Cooper’s name, he’s never been a favorite of mine. People don’t realize how popular a sex symbol he was; they say that part of the reason the HUAC committee finally got shot down in flames with the public was when they questioned the patriotism of the United States Army and Gary Cooper. The great costume designer Irene, a friend of Coop’s, jumped out of a hotel window after slashing her wrists when he died; she’d secretly loved him for years. Still, whether he turns you on or not, he’s not everyone’s idea of a mousy professor. And my very favorite actress of all time, Barbara Stanwyck, isn’t everyone’s idea of a femme fatale. But together, in this riotous Howard Hawks classic, they’re dynamite. Look for Elisha Cook, Jr. in a bit part as a hep-cat waiter - “She’s root, zoot and cute, and solid to boot.” At least he doesn’t get shot, again. The script, by the best of the best, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, is a masterpiece, a Valentine to American slang, which had reached its absolute apex during and after World War II. Sample dialog: When Stanwyck describes her supposed sore throat, she says “Are you kidding? It’s redder than the Daily Worker and twice as sore.” It’s all so rapid-fire, you may have to screen it more than once to catch them all. Don’t miss this one, even if you haven’t got a romance with the English language. Pass the popcorn.

And for a perfectly scholarly explanation of the work fuck, have a look at this animation (possibly with the volume turned down), which sounds astionishingly like the Oxford English Dictionary (PBIN) entry.