Calling leaders names

A fruit of many hours on Twitter reading political and social threads.

What's up with calling our leaders names?

In some professions or volunteer jobs, being called names is not only par for the course, it would raise eyebrows if the name calling stopped.

Take the average German K league soccer match. A match where no idiot, asshole, or bastard (their German equivalents, of course) is hurled at the ref is not considered a real game, even if all players are on their best behavior.

Shouting matches erupt regularly in and around bars, supplying more of the everybody does it, so why bother argument.

Nonetheless, we thought, insulting national figures is worth looking at. One reason for this is that it used to be a capital offense in many places around the world, and even the French, known for their revolution which did not limit itself to name calling, had a law on the book that criminalized even minor insults of the president until very recently.

A small sign with "bugger off" was worth up to a year in prison. In Thailand, today, say something bad about the king, and the king's men will do a Humpty Dumpty on you.

The K-Landnews consensus is that you should be polite but that swearing like a sailor at your leaders is no big deal and should not be penalized.

Like the soccer ref, leaders should expect it and take it.

Why? Above all because hurling a few insults is vastly preferable to hurling stones, and the real or perceived powerless among us should have a way to express frustration verbally.

You can not realistically expect every citizen to master the finer points of insult, like the stinging and deeply hurtful "Good Day, Sir" with just the right accent to do its damage.

Other than the therapeutic insult, our personal view is simplistic: they do it too, whether they insult a group, for instance, poor people are just lazy, or foreigners just come here to take advantage of us, or whether they pick on an individual, as former British Prime Minister Brown's perfectly functioning microphone transmitted when he insulted a little old lady. Literally.

The official argument for punishing folks who insult one of our fearful leaders is that you are not punished so much for insulting the person but for insulting the office or institution. Nice as the argument sounds, it fails to explain why, say, the guy with the "bugger off" sign puts it up for a single specific person and not for every president who happens to motorcade around the hood.