Politicians Aren’t Cool Enough to Curse This Much

I’ve worked with a lot of senior officers, and I know the military is a swearing culture, but men and women with stars on their shoulders have all mastered some basic rules of public deportment, and Hegseth’s naughtiness landed in front of that audience with a quiet thud. We’ve come a long way since Norman Mailer’s publisher made the silly demand that he replace the classic f-bomb with “fug” in his 1948 novel, The Naked and the Dead, which supposedly prompted the actor Tallulah Bankhead to say, upon meeting Mailer, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck.” I don’t really wish for a return to the days when network censors deliberated over the acceptability of hell and damn on TV shows. On Broadway, he minces through Hamilton as a foppish, sinister clown, singing to the estranged rebels, “You’ll be back” and adding, “I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.” In truth, the public opening by the British Crown of George III’s papers in the past decade reveals him to be a far more complex, accomplished, and even estimable figure than the prevailing caricature.

Author: Tom Nichols

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