Bastard means Hollywood agent

National Review, Nov 4, 1991 by Florence King

LET US NOW praise insensitivity before it's too late. The old adage that sticks and stones may break our bones but words can never hurt us is not true. Words do hurt, and can therefore help in stanching what the New Euphemists call "a breakdown in the social order."

The Sensitivity Industry started with a 1941 movie, Blossoms in the Dust, starring Greer Garson as Edna Gladney, the Texas woman who campaigned to have the word illegitimate removed from birth certificates. The movie's message that the word illegitimate follows people through life is dramatized in the account of the character who commits suicide rather than produce her bar-sinistered birth certificate when applying for a marriage license with a man who does not know her origins. The climax comes when Miss Garson, before the Texas legislature, delivers her famous clincher line, "There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents!"

I first saw Blossoms at age six in Washington's Tivoli theater, then the jewel of a solid middle-class neighborhood and now an abandoned, rat-infested shell in a neighborhood where illegitimate births run rampant. When I saw the movie again recently, I decided Edna Gladney's good intentions had paved a good stretch of the road to hell that we are currently traveling.

What the movie does not show are the unmarried girls of that supposedly unenlightened era who must have thought twice about having sex because they did not want to ruin the life of the child that might result. But because of Edna Gladney and our memories of the glamorous Greer Garson in the movie role, girls of my generation grew up saying earnestly, "I would never go all the way before I'm married, but if I did, and if I got pregnant, I would give the baby up for adoption so it could have a fresh start."

That sounds highly moral in our present age of abortion and "single parenting." But had we known that there was no such thing as a fresh start, and that illegitimate would be stamped on that baby's official papers forever, our pseudo-sophisticated earnestness would have died a-borning.

"Social pressure" has lately acquired a bad name and been blamed for the epidemics now plaguing us, but we had better start giving it a good name soon because in an unlimited democracy dominated by mass media, the law of social pressure is the only law that people can be counted on to obey.

Edna Gladney has done her questionable work. Bastard now means "Hollywood agent" and there is no going back, but insensitivity is not dead. We can still cramp a few destructive styles with some choice colloquialisms that were mothballed in the compassionate Sixties.

For starters we could make drunk a noun again and call drug addicts dope fiends. Next, stop talking about "significant others" and "relationships" and start talking about shacking up. If we use this richly descriptive phrase often enough, the other-directed will be loath to live together without benefit of clergy. When that happens, we can re-educate them to the mature and sophisticated pleasures of the discreet affair, defined as: "When somebody goes home afterward."

The retraining of silver-haired politicians and CEOs who divorce their life companions to take second or "trophy" wives can be achieved by reviving the kind of jokes that the Sensitivity Industry calls "mean-spirited." Jocular references to "the foolish age" used to discourage many older men from acting out their fantasies lest they end up in a punchline. But now, smarmy compassion has joined forces with pseudo-science to produce solemn pronouncements like "self-realization" and "mid-life crisis" that give such men a perfect excuse to jump the fence. The solution, therefore, is to start telling the one about the old goat and the spring chicken.

PUTTING people down" is now the deadliest of sins but the practice has always kept society functioning in a reasonably civilized way. For years the traveling-salesman joke protected unescorted women from unwelcome attentions because the traveling salesman was such a famous symbol of crudeness that any woman could get rid of any man merely by calling him one. Nowadays he's a "sales executive," which only encourages him.

The iceman joke saved bored housewives from themselves. The punchline scene of the husband coming home and finding a block of melting ice on the kitchen floor was so firmly embedded in the national psyche that people dreaded getting involved in an afternoon amour: the human spirit recoils from the idea of turning into a cliche. Today such a comedy of errors is given the humorless name of "encounter" and credited with saving marriages.

"Social pressure" itself is a euphemism; its real name is shame. Current levels of social chaos suggest that nothing but a revival of merciless mockery will turn the tide. Compassionate liberals who declared war on putdowns should look around at the cesspool that has resulted from our refusal to judge people harshly and reflect on the wise words of George Orwell: "Jokes about nagging wives and tyrannous mothers-in-law . . . do at least imply a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble and family loyalties taken for granted."