Roger Ebert’s Relevance to a 20-Something

While perusing Fark.com the other day I came across an interesting headline, something about Roger Ebert, the famed movie critic, being some sort of scary religiophile (Yup, new word. You’re welcome, World.) The linked page was an article supposedly written by Ebert in which he ‘answers’ questions commonly thrown at the Creationism argument and in doing so, espouses all of the tenants of said argument, including some of the usual headliners: Earth is only a few thousand years old, Noah really did have a giant boat (and even though nobody ever mentions it, I’m relatively certain that the boat was largely a floating toilet), something other than the Colorado River formed the Grand Canyon, and so on. After I finished reading the article, I was left with a kind of “Huh…who knew?” sort of feeling, and I went on with my day.

Just a few moments ago I was back on Fark.com and noticed that there was a new link posted, this one as a follow-up piece to Ebert’s previous article. This new article was also authored by Ebert, and was written in response to the “…firestorm on the web…” created by his earlier post. In it, Ebert was attempting to show the general public how frequently we accept at face-value the things we hear, articles we read, political advertisements we see on television and virtually anything else to which we are exposed. In his opinion, we too rarely bother with trying to figure out the author’s intended meaning of any communication, and instead we assume that if the author wanted to say something, he would just come out and say it. Whether or not that is true is hardly the sort of thing I have any interest in discussing, mostly because there is no way to know for sure without performing several gigantic studies, though the “…firestorm…” offers evidence that it may be true.

Ebert’s big problem, though, was that so few people ‘got it,’ and I have to admit that I was one of them. When I read the original article I assumed that Roger Ebert was simply using his celebrity as a platform from which to inform the world of his views on Creationism and, as the article suggests, offer an informal Q&A to anyone who happened to read it. Interestingly, though, the reason I didn’t ‘get it’ is not what Ebert suggests, that I have a “…decay[ed] … sense of irony and instinct for satire.” Rather, I didn’t ‘get it’ because I don’t know shit about Roger Ebert.

As of two weeks ago, this is all I knew about Roger Ebert:

He’s a white guy who is significantly older than me. He co-hosts a television show (which I’ve never seen a full episode of) on which he critiques movies.

That’s it.

I don’t know where he’s from, I know nothing of his marital status or, come to think of it, his sexual orientation. I’m unaware of any of his political or religious affiliations, whether his books are funny or serious, or even what movies he likes (how’s that for irony?).

How am I supposed to pick up on irony or satire when I can’t fairly consider the source? Moreover, his entire piece about Creationism is believed as fact by literally millions of people around the world. Is it so unlikely that some guy on TV who talks about movies could also be one of them? Tom Cruise thinks he’s an expert on antidepressants, why can’t Roger Ebert be a Bible thumper?

It’s not that we can’t identify irony, satire or even outright lies when we come across them, it’s that these messages are often delivered without the information required to identify them as such. Some would probably say that that is the point, but I disagree. Irony only works if you understand the topics and agents utilized in the example. For instance, I could say “A bleezit was killed yesterday while driving a borzeg,” and most reasonable people would stare at me blankly before asking me about recent drug use. However, if I said “A NASCAR driver was killed yesterday while driving a pedal-powered kiddie car,” most people would recognize the irony almost instantaneously, even if they couldn’t identify it as such.

So when Roger Ebert pens an article espousing the virtues of Christianity, socialism, Pinacate Beetles or anything else in which I have limited interest, I’ll stare blankly, shrug, and go on living my life, continuing to believe that anybody is free to believe anything they want and to talk about it all they want. Although, if he were to write about the evils of movies and television and the people associated with those industries…

Profanity

A topic that I have often found incredibly interesting is that of profanity in American culture. I’m sure that this will be just one of several posts on the topic, as I am constantly finding myself being angered by the restrictions placed upon me by other people because of their irrational and inexplicable fear of certain words.

I realize that to some of you the phrase ‘American culture’ is a humorous oxymoron. Regardless, I believe that American culture exists primarily in the difficulty found in attempting to describe it. That there are so many facets of our culture, and so many large groups existing within America’s borders that have few things in common, is exactly what makes fairly defining and thoroughly explaining our culture so difficult. Though an interesting topic itself, I’ll leave that to another day.

I want to know why it is that a certain series of sounds can be deemed offensive, while numerous others are not. To me, words are simply signs that have an assigned and agreed-upon meaning as determined by the society in which they are used. As our society morphs into a more intelligent, knowledgeable and tolerant one while continuing to hold true to its principles of freedom, I fail to understand how it is that we can so blindly continue to believe that words have ever hurt someone. I can think of no person who has collapsed and died because the moral center of their brain exploded upon being exposed to profanity.

While I would imagine that it doesn’t feel great when your mother tells you to “…fuck off,” the reason it hurts has little to do with the words. For those of us who have heard our mothers say the word ‘fuck’ before, we can say that it didn’t hurt; nor did it hurt when she said the word ‘off.’ But chaining those two together, oddly enough, does. However, what most people fail to realize, is that it isn’t the direct content of the phrase, as it can be interpreted with multiple meanings depending upon the context in which it was said (as a joke compared to a request, for example). What hurts is the implication of the statement: that your mother doesn’t want you around her.

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about this issue, is the idea that word replacement is an acceptable alternative to swearing. When I was a child, saying ‘heck’ instead of ‘hell’ was perfectly acceptable, even preferable in some circles, even though everyone knew what you meant. Also, spelling ‘hell’ by saying ‘h-e-double hockey sticks’ was alright, even in school. Saying ‘crap’ instead of ’shit,’ or ‘frick’ instead of ‘fuck’ (as popularized on the TV show Scrubs), even though virtually everyone knows what is meant is perfectly acceptable. Because of this, it is clearly not the meaning of the word that we take issue with, so I can only conclude that it is the sound. ‘Shit’ must sound like nails being scratched across a chalkboard and ‘fuck’ must sound like Gilbert Gottfried’s voice to those hell-bent on maintaining some sort of linguistic purity in American English, as though there could ever be such a thing.

George Carlin, renowned for his ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television’ bit, lived a pretty fantastic life, and a relatively long one at that, having died at 71 years of age. So if profanity is as ‘bad’ (check out the ‘Comments’ section, too) as some believe, why did he seem to do so well? Shouldn’t he have been ostracized by our society, thrown out on the street and left to die while cold, hungry and alone? Regardless of your thoughts on the last couple of questions, the fact remains that we lifted him up on a pedestal, made him famous, rich and a cultural icon. Strangely, we continue to celebrate the lives and work of other people who have followed Carlin’s lead, while simultaneously condemning them for it.

We Americans seem to have a bizarre desire to continue to separate our truths and our reality from our utopian ideals and perceived desires.  Virtually all of us say that we support the right to free speech, yet we do little to ensure that that right can be freely exercised.  Instead, we actively work toward silencing those with whom we disagree under the guise of safeguarding the easily offended or the highly impressionable.