Why It Means Something When De Niro Says it

You could spend many wasteful hours going back through at least 30 years of my public utterances — blogs, essays, articles, comments — but you’ll never find an F-bomb in any of them. That’s not me. It’s not my most hated word — that would be the C-word — but it’s right up there.

I shake my head a lot, signalling uninvited disgust at the thousands of times I see it on Twitter, on Facebook, in blogs, in real life. I don’t get how “F — — you!!!” adds to any argument, other than making the user feel mighty, mighty good. It’s used so much it’s lost whatever luster it might have had. As slings and arrows, they’re even kind of laughable.

But last night at the Tony Awards Robert De Niro dropped the F bomb — twice — against Donald Trump, and I, an audience of one in my own living room, found myself cheering like a maniac.

So what’s the difference? The difference, as I see it, is in context, power, and visibility.

Context: Trump had just come off of a lunkheaded one-man burlesque at the G7 Summit held in Canada. At the meeting where leaders from the top industrialized countries gather to work on equitable alliances,Trump’s dual roles as chaos creator and spoiled brat became clearer with every word and deed. The Ugliest American embarrassed us once again, and put us in a far weaker position world-wide…