The Untouchables

If you were to solicit opinions on campus about the demographic factor that most divides us as a student body, you'd likely to get an motley assortment of answers—one's political persuasion, one's status as a Greek, one's financial wellbeing, and so forth. But having come from Kansas City, I'm sensitive to how narrowly-defined we come to be simply by virtue of our answer to a single binary question: are you from the Metro Area?

The tenor of the relationship between Kansas Citians and everyone else in the state is difficult to grasp and even more difficult to taxonomize. Perhaps it's best illustrated by comparison: it's less openly antagonistic than the cultural conflict between Americans and the French, but it lacks the novelty, exchange, and genuine curiosity that runs between Americans and the Japanese. It doesn't have any of the sinister and creepy undertones like the relationship between Americans and Russians, but is without the good-humored cheekiness of the relationship between Americans and Canadians. And although there's an explicit economic class component, there aren't any dark injustices lurking in the annals of history, so the struggle is not generally a personal one.

The truth is, for all the rhetoric about “small-town values,” and “big-town opportunities” (and all the other lazy and vague platitudes in between), people from inside the Metro Area just don't understand or care to understand the people outside of it—and vice versa—and other than the fact that “Johnson County” has been established as something of a slur, nobody has ever bothered to have a serious dialogue about it. The implied KC-centric dichotomy here is admittedly slightly false, but even that doesn't hurt my case: students from Wichita, Topeka, Salina, and possibly a few other places scattered around the state probably understand the nature of urban and suburban life, but they usually just ally themselves with the small-town folks, anyway. Students from the Metro Area stand alone.

This line drawn in the sand isn't exactly invisible, either; every freshman knows within two weeks of orientation which side of the tracks he or she lives on. Regional relations at K-State are a terrific mess, probably always have been, and although the disparity of wealth, education and opportunity between us does underlie some of the problems, I think the conflict is in essence a cultural one. I don't know whether the situation is getting better or whether it's even soluble at all, but I think it could be, if only some of my fellow suburbanites would take to heart the following:

Your obnoxious behavior has made us unpopular. Stop.

Righteously indignant rural folks certainly own some of the blame for perpetuating the conflict (every Kansas farmer feeds how many of us?), but the very fact that no explanation needs to be added to the above directive to make it coherent seems proof enough that we all know where the fault lies essentially. In a basic sense, the burden is on the city folk to understand that people who have until now lived their lives on farms and in small towns ultimately ask the same metaphysical and moral questions that we do (or at it's at least not necessarily the case that they don't), and that just like us, they're simply trying to make their way. I make this offering not to imply that I have any genuine understanding of “life in the country,” as it might be trademarked—I don't—but only to illustrate to my compatriots that there's a place under the sun for all of us, and if they figured this out, we would all be better off.

The Sacred

Last week, on campus, somebody swore at me from a distance. This happens not entirely infrequently, and usually seems deeply satisfying to its perpetrators. Who am I to stand in the way of their fun? I usually think in response. Let them holler.

All I could hear distinctly from him was the word “fuck,” which, if you ask me, was actually a demonstration of eloquence in the following way: at some point we've all had the kind of feeling aptly expressed by “fuck” in its various formulations, and he simply elected to use the corresponding language.

In the specific case of my anonymous antagonist, the motive was to express some kind of dissatisfaction with your poor, humble columnist (imagine the thought!), and in general, the locution of the subsequent utterance or thought is usually secondary to the feeling that provokes it. Now, can anyone claim to be so righteous that they've never even had a vulgar thought? Of course not, as anyone who has, for instance, ever attempted to make a left turn at the intersection of Tuttle Creek and Bluemont can attest. And furthermore, not only have we all had these thoughts, we've all voiced them, too; for some, it might come out as “darn it,” “shoot,” or some other euphemism, but the sentiment is common to us all.

So why not articulate these thoughts accordingly? It is hardly foolish or immoral to voice frustration or discontent; vulgarity for its own sake is the explicit purpose of at least some of our prohibited words, after all, and on those we ought to ignore the vacuous self-imposed ban. Now, this proposed permissibility comes with a laundry list of qualifications: moderation and diversity of vocabulary is still important, vulgar slurs and self-serving blasphemy are still probably inappropriate in almost any social context, and most of the sexual vulgarities are still somewhat socially unsuitable even in non-vulgar form. (How much more appropriate is it really in most nontechnical situations to talk of “penises” rather than “dicks?”)

Indeed, there are many prohibited vulgarities that would not benefit from the change at all, but some would, especially those that suffer from what I call, for lack of a better term, the “Voldemort effect,” an absurd kind of liminality in which the subject is permissible in conversation but the specific word denoting the subject is not. (And pardon my ignorance if there were, in fact, practical reasons why his unholy name should not be uttered.) One victim of this strange condition is “shit;” there isn't a prescriptive difference between “shit” and any of its variants, and there isn't much of a descriptive one either, other than that “crap” is acceptable, “feces” is stifled and technical, “poop” is just silly, and “shit” is vulgar and prohibited. Another example is “bitch,” which still has an important and widely used technical definition and several distinct vulgar definitions, one of which concerns the socially safe subject of crabbiness and has several synonyms that don't remove any offensiveness or intentionality from the concept but are somehow permissible (“shrew,” for instance). Stranger still is “bastard,” which has several other proper and distinct definitions, but whose unfortunate status as a vulgarity has rendered all of them unusable.

We are fortunate to speak such a vast and expressive language, and it is a gift we should not forsake, even if for all the right reasons; swearing for the sake of something else might be wrong (for a variety of reasons), but swearing for the sake of expression is sacred.