I was scarcely halfway through my ten o’clock cappuccino when Gretchen rang my desk telephone.
“I have Vice President Joe Biden on Line One,” she chortled. “That’s what I love most about this job, Mr. Collins, all these rich, famous and powerful people call and visit. It’s so [expletive] exciting sometimes!”
“It sure [expletive] is,” I agreed.
“I mean, I just put the [expletive] Vice President of the [expletive] United States on [expletive] hold! How [expletive] cool is that?”
“Pretty [expletive] cool, if you ask me,” I replied. “[Expletive] put him through.”
Biden: Tom? Tom Collins?
Tom: At your service, Mr. Vice President.
Biden: Please, call me Joe.
Tom: Okay then, Joe, how are you doing?
Biden: Just fine, thanks.
Tom: And what’s up?
Biden: Well, ever since I said… uh, um… a certain word… in front of an open microphone at President Obama’s health care bill signing ceremony last Tuesday, I’ve been totally miserable.
Tom: But you just told me you’re fine.
Biden: Oh, come on, Tom, this is America. You say, “How are you?” to an American and I don’t care if they have terminal cancer, chronic cardiopulmonary angina, deep-vein thrombosis, a blinding migraine headache and excruciating pain in every joint of their body, they’re going to say “Just fine, thanks.” You know that – nobody in America actually wants to hear how you’re really feeling.
Tom: Come, come now, Joe, I certainly do.
Biden: That’s different – you’re getting paid to listen to me. Which is why I can tell you that I actually feel terrible. All week long, the press, the media pundits, the Republicans, even some of my own Democratic colleagues – they’ve all been beating up on me for what I said.
Tom: You mean, when, after introducing the President of the United States to a throng of assembled dignitaries who had come to witness and participate in the most important moment in American history since at least the beginning of the latest war in Iraq, if not since Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Great Society legislation of the 1960’s, you had to remind your buddy Barack that this business was a big [expletive] deal?
Biden: Aw, Jeez Louise, Tom, it’s not like I shouted it out or anything. I just… whispered it to him. But the mic picked it up, and before you could say “You Tube,” there I was, star of a viral Internet video!
Tom: I know. Isn’t digital technology just totally awesome?
Biden: When it lets me visit the world of Pandora in a 3D screening of Avatar, yeah, I suppose it is. But when it has me saying “[expletive]” on computer screens all over the world, not so much, I think!
Tom: We must take the good with the bad, Joe. Digital technology in general, and the Internet in particular, have immense power for both good and evil, just like atomic energy.
Biden: Yeah, but everybody on the planet doesn’t have an atomic reactor in their home to play around with!
Tom: The digital genie’s out of the bottle, Joe. It will never go back in again.
Biden: Well, I’m old enough to remember when computers were something that only scientists, mathematicians, engineers, economists and the occasional avant-garde artist used; and, frankly, I liked them a lot better then.
Tom: I’ve heard that from other people your age, Joe, and I certainly think you have a strong argument there, at least. After all, the World Wide Web was designed to provide scientists, mathematicians, engineers, economists and the occasional avant-garde artist with a means to effectively use the Internet for exchange and display of graphical information. But instead, it turned into a way for morons in a hundred and ninety-two nations around the world to spend all day watching clips of people falling down and getting hit in the crotch a million times a minute.
Biden: Or me, saying “[expletive]” a hundred and ninety-two times a second! At this point, I’d say I long for the days when all the young punks lay around the house reading comic books and listening to Top 40 trash on transistor radios! Nowadays, the kids listen to me saying “[expletive]” on Internet videos, then go to school the next day and say [expletive] to their social studies teacher during the lesson on the First Amendment, and argue “If the Vice President can say [expletive] in public, then why can’t we?”
Tom: Oh, I don’t think it’s all that…
Biden: Oh, yes it is! My office has already gotten over a thousand e-mails about it from irate social studies teachers! Teaching the First Amendment to adolescents is tough enough, they’re telling us, without having to spend two extra classroom instruction units on the difference between James Joyce saying “[expletive]” in Ulysses, Larry Flynt saying “[expletive]” in a magazine full of nude women playing with carrots, pickles and bananas, and Vice President Joe Biden saying “[expletive]” on television at the White House; plus, then having to explain why those are different from somebody getting banned from Facebook for writing “I am so [expletive] pumped up about getting on the cheer leading squad” on their home page.
Tom: Well, Joe, I’m pretty sure that neither James Joyce nor Larry Flynt actually ever said “[expletive]” in print.
Biden: They didn’t?
Tom: Certainly Joyce didn’t; and Flynt definitely hasn’t so far. Both of them were far too smart for something like…
Biden: Hey, wait a minute here…
Tom: Be that as it may; bottom line, Joe, despite what the carping kingpins of conservatism might claim, what you said is not obscene, and, consequently, this stray dog they just adopted simply won’t hunt.
Biden: Really?
Tom: Without a doubt.
Biden: Uh… how come?
Tom: Because, Joe, those ranting Republican retards are yelling and screaming about your use of obscenity, but, in doing so, they are expressly ignoring the accepted and officially approved definition of what obscenity actually is.
Biden: Right, sure they are. Ah, what is it?
Tom: In the United States of America, which is where this tempest in a teapot storms with such unrelenting fury, the concept of obscenity is not a whit more nor a jot less than its embodiment as a concept within the Supreme Court’s collective hermeneutic analysis of the Constitution.
Biden: Huh?
Tom: My point is, as we both know all too well, Joe, the Constitution of the United States of America means exactly what the Supreme Court says it does – nothing more and nothing less.
Biden: Uh… yeah. And?
Tom: Well, then, I’m sure you’re familiar with the two most famous quotes regarding the First Amendment, aren’t you?
Biden: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” and “I regret I have but one life to give for my country?”
Tom: Ah, well, no… that first one was Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, from the Battle of Mobile Bay, during the Civil War; and the second one was the last words of Nathan Hale, the first American to be hanged as a spy – by the British in the Revolutionary War.
Biden: I knew that.
Tom: Of course you did.
Biden: Okay, so what are the two most famous quotes regarding the First Amendment?
Tom: “Even the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect someone falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater and thereby causing a panic.”
Biden: Who said that?
Tom: Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Biden: Oh, come on! Everybody knows him and his buddy Doctor Watson are fictional characters invented by Edgar Allan Poe.
Tom: That’s Sherlock Holmes, who was invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Edgar Allan Poe invented the character Auguste Dupin. But you’re correct, at least, that Dupin was the inspiration for Holmes. Oliver Wendell Holmes was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Biden: What, lately?
Tom: No, he died in 1935.
Biden: Oh, [expletive], that was seven years before I was even [expletive] born! How could I be expected to know that?
Tom: A familiarity with history, perhaps?
Biden: Are you kidding? I’m a lawyer, okay?
Tom: Legal history, then?
Biden: Look, unless it’s a precedent, [expletive] it, that’s what I say. So what’s this second quote you wanted to tell me about?
Tom: Potter Stewart.
Biden: Oh, him, yeah. Appointed to the Supreme Court by Eisenhower, back in the Fifties.
Tom: Yeah, right, Joe, and, as a matter of fact, his is the second most famous Supreme Court quote regarding the First Amendment, and, furthermore, the one I would like to point out with respect to this situation. Justice Stewart said “I shall not today attempt further to define… the description of obscenity… but I know it when I see it.”
Biden: Yeah, come to think of it, it seems to me I do recall him saying that; or maybe hearing that he said that, anyway.
Tom: Very well then, Joe. I would invite you to think about what you said Tuesday in the context of that definition.
Biden: Oh, no, now you’ve got me really worried.
Tom: Why?
Biden: Because, ah, well, won’t the average person know that when I said “[expletive],” it was obscene?
Tom: Not at all, Joe. My point is, Justice Stewart was channeling the mind of the average American when he defined obscenity. He knew what it means to be a Supreme Court Justice, and he was a pretty good one, too, by anybody’s standards. Most American’s aren’t educated or smart enough to tell you what “context” means, but that does not, by any stretch of the imagination, imply that they aren’t aware of, and constantly employing the concept of context all the time. And they understand, Joe – in some ways, even better than you and me – what the First Amendment means. After all, it was the American people who demanded it – and demanded it, for that matter, as the very first amendment to our Constitution.
Biden: You’re right, Tom. God bless the American people.
Tom: And God bless the Constitution of the United States.
Biden: [Expletive] yeah!
Tom: So what’s an “obscene” use of the word “[expletive]?” I say, if Dick Cheney, who just happened to be Vice President of the United States at the time, stood up on the floor of the United States Senate and yelled “Go [expletive] yourself” to the duly elected senator from the state of Vermont, well, now, that’s obviously obscene, and any American who isn’t blinded by partisan politics can see it. It was a nasty, mean-spirited, un-called for, and frankly perverted thing to say; and furthermore, any decent American knows that. But what you did – hell, that’s like some working stiff running into the corner bar and yelling “Jesus [expletive] Christ! My buddy Joe Biden just won the [expletive] lottery for one hundred and twenty [expletive] million [expletive] dollars!”
Biden: No [expletive] [expletive]! I did? Why didn’t somebody [expletive] tell me?
Tom: No, no, Joe, what I’m saying is, due to the context, when you said “[expletive]” any normal American would realize it was a simple expression of jubilation, exactly like that example which I thoughtfully provided just now. From your point of view, and those of millions of loyal Democrats across our great nation, it was like the American people just won the lottery – see?
Biden: Uh… yeah. Right. Okay, sure.
Tom: And another thing, Joe – something I would ask that you never, ever forget.
Biden: What?
Tom: It really is a big [expletive] deal, what you and President Obama and the Democrats in Congress did with health care reform. And I want to thank you, President Obama and all the Democrats in Congress for doing it.
Biden: In that case then, Tom Collins, you are so [expletive] welcome!
Tom: No charge for this chat.
Biden: I’ll give the fee to charity, then.
Tom: Isn’t that just like you? Take care.
Biden: ‘Bye!