The Age of Rudeness

"The rudeness of these public figures gives pleasure and relief, it is clear, to their audiences. Perhaps what they experience is not the possibility of actual violence but a sort of intellectual unbuttoning, a freedom from the constraint of language. Perhaps they have lived lives in which they have been continually outplayed in the field of articulation, but of this new skill — rudeness — they find that they are the masters. My mother’s death threats undoubtedly arose from her frustration with my own use of language. What I did not take into account when I spoke to her was the difference in our social positions. She was a housewife with little education and a rapidly retreating beauty, for whom life was a process of discovering that no greatness had been held in store for her. She did such things for me as cook and clean, while I was on my way to university and liberty. Yet to my mind, she had an extraordinary power, the power to blacken my mental outlook and ruin my prospect of life. When I spoke to her, I thought I was addressing a tyrant in whose overthrow my only weapons were words. But words were the very things that roused her to violence, because at her life’s core, she had been separated from them. Her labor, her maternal identity, her status were all outside the language economy. Instead, she formulated a story of herself whose simplifications and lies infuriated me. I aimed to correct her with truth — perhaps I thought that if only I could insult her with sufficient accuracy, we would be reconciled — but she refused to be corrected, to be chastened. In the end, she won by being prepared to sacrifice the moral basis of language. She didn’t care what she said, or rather, she exacted from words the licentious pleasures of misuse; in so doing, she took my weapon and broke it before my eyes. She made fun of me for the words I used, and I couldn’t respond by threatening her with death. I couldn’t say “I could kill you” because it wasn’t true, and in language I had staked everything on telling the truth."

"The Age of Rudeness"
Rachel Cusk