By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – They had to bleep Robert DeNiro.

Not once, but twice.

There he was at the Tony Awards on network television and he dropped the f-bomb.

Not once, but twice.

He said it about President Donald Trump. DeNiro has the same regard for the president that a dog does for a fire hydrant.

And DeNiro wanted to make that clear.

On national television.

Not once, but twice.

The actor’s verbal spasm was the just most recent example of an epidemic of public crudity.

Just days earlier, comic Samantha Bee ignited a brushfire by calling Ivanka Trump an “a feckless ****.” Bee lashed out at the first daughter for ignoring the forced separations of children from their immigrant parents seeking asylum in the United States.

Bee apologized for the vulgarity and said she had “crossed a line.”

Bee’s outburst followed on the heels of the career meltdown of onetime TV sitcom queen Roseanne Barr.

Barr, who apparently never met a conspiracy theory she didn’t love, tweeted that former presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett, an African-American, was the love child of a Muslim terrorist and an ape.

Barr apologized, then didn’t, then apologized again, then didn’t, then apologized some more, then didn’t some more.

After that, I stopped paying attention.

All this leaves me befuddled.

I make my living with words. Like any craftsman of reasonable dedication and discipline, I take the tools of my trade seriously.

Much of the challenge of writing is selecting the right word or words to drive home the message, tell the story or illuminate the truth. Close isn’t good enough. As Abraham Lincoln once said, using almost the right word is like arguing that a chestnut horse is the same as a horse chestnut.

To write well – to communicate well – one must know the difference between a chestnut horse and a horse chestnut. One must know what a word means and the effect it will have on an audience.

I love to swear.

In private, that is.

Curse words and other vulgarities can be marvelously flexible devices. As the late comic George Carlin observed, certain swear words can serve as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and even, in some cases, as punctuation. They are wonderful ways to express strong feelings.

But using obscenities in most public settings is like showing a dog a squirrel. Once the dog sees the squirrel, he loses sight of everything else around him.

Robert DeNiro, Samantha Bee, and Roseanne Barr all are smart people. They’ve made their careers and darned good livings by engaging with audiences and anticipating how those audiences will react.

That’s why their choices puzzle me.

Samantha Bee, for example, wanted to draw attention to a genuine moral crisis, the Trump administration’s mean-spirited decision to separate families at our border for reasons understood only by folks who drank the Kool-Aid in the White House.

No one, though, paid any attention to Bee’s point because, like the dog chasing the squirrel, people were so focused on the vulgarity she used that they forgot about everything else.

The same goes for DeNiro. Doubtless, he wanted to express opposition to the president’s crudity and insensitivity, but he ended up emulating those traits. Whatever point he wanted to make was overwhelmed, overshadowed and overlooked by his word choice.

It’s hard to know whether Barr had anything valid to say. But unless her message was “please toss my career and reputation onto the trash heap, douse everything with gasoline and then set the whole thing ablaze,” it’s safe to assume her point also was lost somewhere along the way.

Many people – including the one in the White House – now use words simply for their shock value. They like the bright bursts certain expressions produce because they create distractions and divert people from understanding what’s really going on or being said.

But words matter.

Because of ideas matter.

Principles matter.

The truth matters.

And the people who don’t understand that don’t know the difference between a chestnut horse and a horse chestnut.

FOOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.