JONATHAN LETHEM
In May 1968 Robert Cohen walked into a courthouse in Los Angeles wearing a jacket with “Fuck the Draft” stenciled on the back, in order to testify on behalf of a friend. By the time he entered the courtroom, he’d folded the jacket into his lap, but a policeman had noticed him wearing it in the corridor and become incensed. After trying and failing to get the judge to hold Cohen in contempt of court, the irate cop put the nab on him personally. The charge, ironically, was “disturbing the peace.” (I suppose we still await a statue called “Disturbing the War.”) After an initial conviction, the judgment was overturned in appellate court on the beautiful grounds that Cohen’s behavior had been, yes, “offensive” but not “tumultuous”—that is, had incited no other person to a violent response—and that both conditions need to be present to meet the statute’s standard for peace disturbance. The state appealed back and won. Cohen’s attorneys appealed. Cohen’s case reached the Supreme Court three years later.
This case beckoned to me in a few different ways. Truthfully, it seemed like it had my name on it. The spring of 1971 was a fateful one in the relation of my family’s life to what was, at the time, an ongoing condition, on my parents’ part, of protest of the Vietnam War. My mother was arrested, along with many hundreds of others, during the May Day protest, for occupying the steps of the US Capitol. She was in the early stages of pregnancy with my sister at the time. In the jailhouse to which she and her friends were bused, they were crowded into tiny cells and spent their time incarcerated without food and water (they also protested the conditions of their incarceration by taking what small food they were finally offered, bologna sandwiches, and removing the filler and smacking it up to stick on the wall of the cell: meat graffiti). Eventually an ACLU lawyer attained a settlement from the federal government for wrongful arrest, establishing that the space of the Capitol steps was a public commons from which the protesters had been unjustly removed. Growing up, I was always told that the money from this settlement, though it was just a few thousand dollars, had formed the basis of the fund for sending me off to college. The judgment in favor of my mother and her co-arrestees seems to form a little rhyme with that in favor of Cohen’s Fuck the Draft jacket.
I was also, as a kid, a little free speech absolutist and a pottymouth. So was my mother. It would have been right around 1971, when I was seven, that she’d given me a little lecture I distinctly recall (likely it was given several times) about how the sorts of words that our family sometimes used inside the house weren’t appropriate for me to repeat at school. This went together with an injunction not to repeat, outside the safe company of a few sympathetic souls, the scalding mockery our parents and their friends applied to the Nixon presidency—he’s a schmuck, he’s a vampire, he’s obviously compensating for a lifetime of sexual frustration, probably just needs a good fuck—word-for-word in front of my teachers or other adults I didn’t know.
Now—of course—I wasn’t really going to speak these things back to my mother. So I was being instructed to listen to things I couldn’t make use of myself for the time being. They were allowed to sink into my expressive lexicon to be retrieved for use at some unknown juncture, according to some as-yet-unspecified future necessity.
And yet, that word, fuck—that I also heard with regularity in another place, on the city streets. Kids on the pavement used it as an unfriendly but pungent synonym for the phrases “what are” or “what do” as in the formulations “Fuck you looking at?” and “Fuck you think you’re doing walking away when I’m talking to you?”
And I read it in books, like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which I soon snuck off my mother’s shelves. The Zipless Fuck.
And Henry Miller.
And then there was the strange case of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, where everywhere the word fug had been substituted—pretty obviously, it seemed. Were soldiers really so discreet?
And the band, the Fugs, who’d taken their name from Mailer’s weird euphemism. My mother was pals with one of them, Tuli Kupferberg. And the Fugs had tried to levitate the Pentagon at an antiwar protest in 1967—the same one Mailer wrote about in The Armies of the Night.
And the banned books that had been freed, heroically: Nabokov & Co. obscenity trials, Howl, the Grove Press, the pulping of J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. All of this was part of the cultural world that most thrilled me, and by the time I went to college, I knew, for instance, who Charles Rembar was and had read his book about defending Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill before the Supreme Court—a book featuring an introduction by Rembar’s cousin, Norman Mailer.
Much later, I was allowed to play my tiny part in the public life of “fuck” by a quirk of fate. The New York Times chose to excerpt the first sentence from a number of new novels for a promotional feature. I was included, but the first sentence of my book was, “Quit fucking black cops or get booted from the Communist Party.” An exception was granted, by unseen powers, to the newspaper’s legendarily prudish boycott on that word. There followed a brief stir as I became the occasion of the Times’s first publication of the word fucking in its pages.
I guess I’d found my juncture.
All this, but I’d never heard of Robert Cohen and his unruly jacket. It had been waiting until now to find me.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cohen’s freedom to wear the jacket—narrowly, in a 5–4 split. Cohen was represented by the wonderfully named Melville Nimmer, the State of California by Michael Sauer. Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote the opinion. He cleared space for defending the utterance by judging fuck, in this instance at least, as not an “erotic” word—not therefore a matter of public obscenity yet not an incentive to fighting either: “No individual actually or likely to be present could reasonably have regarded the words on appellant’s jacket as a direct personal insult.” He then coined the memorable phrase, “One man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” which is nearly like a line Bob Dylan would have crossed out of an early draft of “Gates of Eden.”
The dissent, written by Harry Blackmun, arched an eyebrow at Harlan’s second assertion. “Fuck,” in the case of the jacket, was an example of “conduct,” not defensible speech. “Fuck the Draft” was “fighting words.”
For what it’s worth, I like the word, and use it plenty, because I disagree with Harlan here. Fuck retains its aura because it is both imperishably erotic and a fighting word. Its magic capacity for oscillation between these signifying powers, as in my mother’s language realm and in the books on her shelves, describes its unusual value. Even as capitalism has tried to siphon off fuck’s aura through peekaboo appropriations like “Fuddruckers” and “Fcuk Jeans,” it holds true. Ask the hip-hop group N.W.A., for instance.
Cohen, who goes under another name now, recently spoke about his case: “I didn’t even see the wording on the jacket until the morning before I was headed to court to testify on behalf of an acquaintance. I was and am a patriotic person.”
The famous jacket? It had been stenciled and given to him by a female friend, just the night before. “I had a PhD in partying back in those days. I wasn’t trying to make a political statement.”
Well, fuck, man, you did anyway.