Fuck “Civility”

Oh golly gosh, it seems I’ve already broken the first cardinal rule of Canadian Cynic’s facetious “challenge” haven’t I? My bad. Quick… before some of Frank Hilliard’s utopian “Progressives” prevent such an occurrence from taking place… just shoot me.

It would be all too easy of course to side with the morally decent angels and predictable old farts of conventional propriety on this issue and agree with the likes of tiresome fossils like Andy Rooney in their deeply boring assertion that vulgar profanity in our language coarsens and cheapens our discourse, while at the same time having the shameful effect of somehow spiritually degrading us in the process, but I’ve never been able to entirely subscribe to that point of view for some reason. It could be that I come from a long line of grubby, low class coal-miners, or it maybe because it’s just a profoundly dumb idea that somehow manages to continually sustain itself in defiance of reason and is held aloft on little more than the prevailing wind of an elitist prejudice that defies reality.

My dearest friend in the world quite adamantly disagrees with me on this matter and we’ve hashed this out at some length with little satisfaction ever gained on either side. In a former iteration of this blog we discussed the relative merits of the word “fuck” for example and while there was a good deal of interesting discussion about the relative merits of its usage, I’m not sure any of us ever came to much of a definitive conclusion one way or the other.

But let’s turn back to the matter at hand: CC’s “Dumbfuck Wanker Challenge” (the title of which is ironically self-defeating). The presumed intent of this exercise is to be temporarily “civil” and “family friendly” in exchange for a corresponding vow from so-called “conservatives” (aka “wingnuts” or “Blogging Tories”) to avoid being lying, stinking hypocrites for just a day. Sorry, but this just doesn’t seem like much of a wager to me; to the contrary, I’d suggest that it’s pretty much of a foregone conclusion. As such, what’s the point?