Hokum and Taboo

There is a small political stink going on in my town over a  couple of the pro-Obama  political signs that were defaced recently. It is not known whether the work was done by opponents or pro-Obama agents  provocateur, but the local Democrats are up in arms with one of their perennial candidates calling for an investigation by the hate crime police.  The reason for their and the local newspaper’s going into such a tizzy is of course that the vandalism took the form of writing the word “nigger” on the signs.

It is indicative of a strange  cultural phenomenon, where a word is held in such dread that it is rarely printed or spoken (except by black people, oddly enough), but rather referred  to fearfully and  surreptitiously as the “N-word”.  The term is after all  only a vulgarism, one of many offensive words in the language that polite people avoid using. Yet many people these days treat it as some sort of dread tribal taboo, almost in the manner of the superstitious savages in an old movie fearing  some  forbidden utterance will cause the gods to make the volcano erupt. It reaches a point where the silliness of it  all can make one wonder whether a lot of one’s fellow Americans are thinking  all that much more clearly than the savages with the volcanoes.

It is also interesting to consider trends of  fashion with respect to taboo words. A few decades ago, “fuck” was a word that may not be spoken, while the usage of “nigger”, though considered vulgar and low class,  was not taboo in the same sense. Now that is reversed. This may reflect the fact that while the sanctimony and  hypocrisy of the former time were often  centered on sex, the sanctimony and  hypocrisy of our time are  often focused on race.