[A column of mine that appeared in The Vocabula Review in April 2011 — happier times for Kobe fans, which seems to mean pretty much everyone. Forgive the snark early on; I was, after all, trying to take his side in my curmudgeonly way.--JK]
APRIL 13, 2011
Hello, WTFR? . . Yes, I’d like to make a dedication. To Kobe Bryant. . . . Yes, the same one. . . . Just a fan, but I’m thinking of him. . . . Can you play “If I Could Turn Back Time,” by Cher?
[Intense Glam-Rock introduction, the sound of big emotions and big hair]
If I could turn back time
If I could find a way
I’d take back those words that have hurt you
And you’d stay . . .
Memo to those who have better things to do than follow celebrity news: Kobe is in trouble again. And in a way it is about sex again, though this time the flap is nowhere near as grave as the rape charge, filed against him in 2003, that evolved into 2004’s civil suit (after a “public apology” admired in legal circles for the way it married overdone contrition to a denial of actual guilt), and then into a 2005 settlement for “unspecified damages” to the nicely recovering Kobe brand.
No, this time the brouhaha concerns a word: one syllable, three bare phonemes. In an April 12 game with San Antonio, the Lakers’ Bryant incurred a personal foul, protested it with his usual energy, got hit with a technical , and was pulled from the game by his coach (the hardly less famous Phil Jackson). The game camera tracked Kobe to the bench, where his slightly squinty eyes went on smoldering with the fire that has made him a player for the ages. He threw a towel and jostled a chair, but clearly found the relief insufficient. He shouted “Bennie!”, twice, to get the attention of referee Bennie Adams.
So far no problem: all this was well within the bounds of sports melodrama, the chest-beating fun that sells all the shoes and Gatorade. But then, too quickly to be restrained by teammates or intercepted by video editors, Kobe confounded commerce and ritual decorum by uttering, on 54-inch screens and surround-sound systems across the nation, the word that, in manly contrast to the AP and the networks, I dare to quote in full:
“Fag!”
So there it was, unburnished, naked, appalling. Reaction, as they say, was swift. Within hours David Stern, the league’s exquisitely named commissioner, imposed a fine of $100,000 and officially condemned the syllable, declaring that “insensitive or derogatory comments are not acceptable and have no place in our game or society.”(Please pause to notice how artfully, in that last sentence, I avoid the standard pleonasm, “said in a statement.”) The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group, denounced the outburst as a “disgrace” and noted that the F-word “perpetuates a culture of discrimination and hate that all of us . . . should be working to eradicate.”
In the next couple of days, one writer in the New York Times, William Rhoden, opined that the fine was too small and that Bryant should have been suspended. Another, John Amaechi, revered as the first NBA player to “come out” publicly, launched a passionate appeal to Bryant to understand the damage that his little word daily inflicts in the lives of youngsters still trapped in the social blast furnace of high school. “Right now in America young people are being killed and killing themselves simply because of the words and behaviors they are subjected to for being perceived as lesbian or gay . . . ” Rhoden, too, invoked the specters of hate crime and gay suicide. And Amaechi echoed the HRC’s point that Bryant’s speech-act participates in gargantuan Larger Systems of evil and oppression: “When . . . the best basketball player in a generation . . . hurls that antigay slur at a referee or anyone else . . . he is telling boys, men and anyone watching . . . ” that it is acceptable to hate gays.
Bryant himself hardly seemed to disagree. In fact he had anticipated his critics, bright and early the day after the game, with a semi-apology (again we escape the deadly inanity of “said in a statement”!), about as contrite as one could expect from an ego so long marinated in public adulation:
What I said last night should not be taken literally. My actions were out of frustration during the heat of the game, period. The words expressed do NOT reflect my feelings towards the gay and lesbian communities and were NOT meant to offend anyone.
Or as Cher would put it,
I don’t know why I did the things I did
I don’t know why I said the things I said
Pride's like a knife it can cut deep inside
Words are like weapons they wound sometimes.
Kobe did appeal the fine, which after all amounts to more than cab fare. But he promised to do public relations work on behalf of LGBT causes; and several commentators noted that he has a modest but praiseworthy record of speaking out for tolerance and understanding of gays. Of course none of this appeased Rhoden or Amaechi. The former called his apology “soulless” and the latter condemned it with what seems to me an oddly tangential gloss:
I am amazed that people still think apologizing in such a way as to make it clear that it was the victims who misunderstood is acceptable. I had hoped that the sorry-if-you-are-oversensitive school of apology would by now have been thoroughly discredited.
A good point, but is it really Bryant’s statement he is talking about?
I have often enjoyed booing and hissing Kobe Bryant from the safety of my living room, as his Lakers battled my Chicago Bulls. But on this occasion, fearlessly and no doubt foolishly, I leap to his defense, sort of. Of course he was dead wrong (as he admits) to use that word, that way, in that situation. Of course he should not use it again, nor should you or I. Overall, though, Bryant seems to me to keep his sense of proportion rather better than his critics. And I find him to be a better theorist of language, evincing a surer sense of how words really work. Of course it is all too easy for me, a white male, heterosexual as of this post, to say the taunt should not be taken so seriously. And it would be the height of insensitivity for me to argue that, if we are going to insult people, after all we must call them something. But I am going to do it anyway.
Bryant’s explanation that he did not mean the slur “literally” is exactly on point. If Bennie Adams really were a known homosexual, and Kobe had vilified him for it in front of millions, that would be literal, and far more brutal than the actual case. But here, pretty clearly, our hero used the F-word simply because it seemed a handy rock to throw: not because he harbors real hostility toward what his semi-demi-apology calls, in chastened PC-speak, “the gay and lesbian communities.”
Insults tend to be metaphorical because language itself is; and in addition they have, even more than most words, a ritualized, arbitrary, abstract quality. If I call someone “You ass!”, the sting comes partly from the image of the animal itself, which can be seen as contemptible if one likes, in what must have been a fresh and daring metaphor at some point. But by now the figure has largely faded, and people speak and hear the slur without much picturing the critter; indeed, many picture a buttocks instead (cf. you asshole), so little does it seem to matter. Remarkably, however, the insult retains clarity and force through pure convention; we understand its operational meaning and assigned candlepower even while the screen of the imagination stays dim. I can choose other animals if I like – pig, mule, worm, skunk – but each will shade my meaning in one way or another, and will vary its force. Some simply will not do: horse, dog, deer, lion. There is a kind of implicit bureaucracy of insult that requires that the thing be done in form.
But of course no one thinks I really mistake the species of my victim. And crucially, no one has to subscribe to underlying prejudices in order to employ the available verbal machinery. It is easy to imagine a fancier of donkeys and burros (or of buttocks) angrily crying “ass!” without any sense of self-contradiction. In the same way, a staunch feminist might call an enemy “son of a bitch” without feeling hypocritical, or intending real disrespect to the fellow’s mother or women generally. (For that matter, she might well direct the slur at another woman. I recently heard my sister describe herself as “low man on the totem pole” at her new job, but she was not reporting recent elective surgery.)
Again, almost anyone might cry “Bastard!” in a moment of stress, without the slightest thought of demeaning out-of-wedlock children, though technically the term does just that. A dedicated Special Education teacher might cry “Moron!” or “Idiot!”, though these days he would likely avoid “Retard!” and be right to do so. But the available stock of epithets is clearly limited, and this makes literalism especially suspect when we are evaluating insults. Once you make the (admittedly bad) choice to insult someone, there are simply not that many terms you can apply to the purpose. Language itself boxes you in, forcing you to become, for the nonce, a racist, a sexist, an elitist, a homophobe. But a fair assessment of your outburst will stop short of assigning you permanently to any of those categories. Even Amaechi concedes that “Kobe Bryant isn’t some great, bigoted monster, as some have implied” (a non-accusation accusation that nicely mirrors Kobe’s non-apology apology).
All this is to say that Bryant’s superficially bizarre claim—that the term he freely chose “does NOT reflect my feelings”—is plausible after all. He simply was not thinking about the implications of his word, the largely attenuated imagery, but only about its immediate function. Fiercely intent on Bennie Adams, he selected an insult from the bin marked “Extra Strength” and let fly, neglecting to anticipate collateral damage. Unlike Cher, he has not ended up apologizing for intentional hurt to his real target, but for the by-blow to legions of somewhat theoretical bystanders. Part of his problem was surely that on playgrounds and in locker rooms, the early schools of his greatness, that word and others like it are repeated to the point of complete desensitization. So he made a bad choice, but he did not invent those traditions.
In a word, our real beef is not with Kobe. It is with “society,” for making the homosexual an icon of contempt in the first place; and with the conventionalizing habit of language, which preserves such associations through sheer inertia.
Inertia, indeed, might be the fairest charge to make against Bryant. As the Human Rights Campaign says, using that word “perpetuates a culture of discrimination and hate.” But this is like saying that my driving to the grocery store contributes to global warming. It’s fair to make the connection, but not to charge me with the intention of cooking the planet, nor with more than a tiny fraction of the deed itself. Kobe, likewise, did not intend any harm to gays, but he failed, this time, to resist the larger system that routinely shames and oppresses them: a sin but not a huge sin.
And perhaps we should question, just a bit, the axiom that using a pejorative strengthens and validates the underlying pathology. Slurs are tricky things and sometimes gain a dark power from repression, which actual use diminishes. Reacting to the F-bomb or similar ordnance with studied gravity can tend, perversely, to confirm the notion that homosexuality itself is something to get deeply upset about, while a laugh or shrug might fend off the blow more effectively. The academic sub-field of Queer Studies, recently founded, aims to disarm the old antigay slur by embracing rather than repressing it: a more creative strategy, it seems to me, though I might have trouble managing the new diction if I had to attend a conference. The N-word, as everyone notices, can be transformed into a term of affection (though not by me or Jackie Chan) through ironic and humorous use, and so can any other slur. Meanwhile “gay” itself, rolled out hopefully not so long ago as a concise, cheery replacement for all the old pejoratives, over the howls of those who realized they could never again say gay caballero or gay apparel in quite the same way, is tracing the opposite arc. The NBA currently runs a public-service commercial urging kids, those authorities on future usage, not to say “That’s so gay.” I still count the initiative a partial success, but we will need another new term before long. Hate speech is the symptom not the disease, the tail not the dog, and what can be accomplished by fiddling with diction – one’s own or other people’s – is something, but far less than everything.
But this is NOT to say (as Kobe might type it) that there can be no progress in such matters. A reflection I find oddly cheering is that simple obscenity might have served Bryant’s turn much better than the word he chose. When I was young, the F-bomb he hurled would have been, I guess, more or less acceptable. It was that other F-word that filled us with dread and shame, and if it had made its way from the practice floor (where then as now it did redundant service as noun, verb, adjective, and participle) to the TV, the shock would have been deep and lasting. But now? The M/F compound is in every kid’s ear buds, and seems to be evolving into a three- or two-syllable pronoun, that palest of function words. A writer in this week’s New Yorker refers quite casually to a man wearing a “don’t-fuck-with-me watch,” whatever that is.
People of my vintage have trouble adjusting, but even so, I call this change progress. It seems we have stopped worrying so much about sex and now worry much more, probably a little too much, about group identities and rivalries. These days the really unspeakable words all have to do with ethnic and gender stereotypes; these terms have become more evocative and punchy and frightening while mere obscenity has grown pallid and pro forma. The situation presents its own problems, but overall, it seems to me, represents an improvement. Group hatreds really are a bigger threat to society than unbridled sex.
But it is getting harder and harder, these days, to hurl an insult without insulting someone else—not just the fool you have in the crosshairs. I worry about this. Given the general purge of abusive utterance, the few groups still being used as raw material for slurs are right to cry foul. But until we outgrow the need to express rage and disgust and hate—something that is not going to happen tomorrow—what do we do? I cannot share Commissioner Stern’s grand, bland vision of a world in which “insensitive or derogatory comments . . . have no place”—except, perhaps, as his hyperbolic and non-literal way of saying, “Too much, Kobe.” But if the place were actually built, it would have to be populated by Stepford wives and husbands, not human beings.
What if the real problem is not derogatory terms, which we keep purging so busily that the inventors of new ones can hardly keep up, but on the contrary, the drabness and poverty of that part of the language? Would the world be fairer if the language of insult were richer, fuller, more variegated? Just think: slurs could be creatively crafted to the individual case. They would be delivered with greater wit and gusto, and we wouldn’t have to keep drafting the same picked-on groups for onerous duty as underlying metaphors. Keep a weather eye out for a renaissance of the art of invective. A world in which Kobe might call Bennie Adams “Thou insufferable, goat-hearted jackanapes! Thou clay-brained guts, thou nott-pated fool, thou whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-keech!” Now that I would like to see.
