the rise of vulgarity

There are a number of old mixtapes in the car. You remember mixtapes?

Well, these aren’t actually mixtapes; they are mix CDs (you do remember CDs, don’t you?), but the concept is the same. That is, they were compilations of songs—from different albums—that we particularly liked and put together as a personal musical token. A sort of preferred random assortment.

I came across an old one the other day, and since I couldn’t bear to put the car radio on and hear the depressing news of the day, I slid the CD mixtape into the player (yes, our car has a CD player because it is a very old car).

And after listening to a song by the Kinks and one by Bob Seger and another by the Bangles after one by the Mamas and the Papas, I listened to “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” by the Stones.

Remember the song? And do you remember when the Stones appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, back in ’67, and the song was just a little bit—or maybe, depending on your perspective, a lot—different? What had happened was that Sullivan told the band to change what he considered a suggestive lyric—to be precise, the title of the song—or they would be banned from the show, which was the most popular entertainment program in America.

So, the rebellious, outrageous Rolling Stones, the bad boys of the British Invasion, changed the lyrics to the far more innocuous “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.”

Which got me to thinking how very far we have come, which got me inexorably to thinking about the person who has brought us this far, that person whose voice I don’t want to hear on the car radio. Half a century after the Stones couldn’t sing on TV about spending the night together, our world has changed so much we have all this, below, from the most prominent person in the country, to an audience far greater than those who watched the Ed Sullivan Show:

“Let’s bomb the shit out of ISIS,” he said at a campaign rally in 2015.

At a White House immigration meeting in 2018, he talked about a number of African nations as “shithole countries.” 

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” he told reporters in 2020.

In an interview discussing Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu in 2021, he said “Fuck him.”

In an on-camera press gaggle in 2025, he said Israel and Iran, “don’t know what the fuck they are doing.”

Then-Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro doesn’t “want to fuck around with the United States,” he said later that year in remarks from the White House.

Then, of course, on of all days, Easter Sunday of this year, in a post on his stupid social media platform, he told Iran, “Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell.”

And yes, there are many more, so many more.

Let me be clear here: I’m not against cursing. I’m not against vulgarities and do, more than occasionally, use a significant allotment myself.

But also let’s not forget: he’s the fucking president of this shithole country. Ed Sullivan would be astonished.